Ink art in transformation

Whether in the field of calligraphy or painting, an enduring question seems to confront contemporary ink art. Does the genre strictly refer to works composed with ink on paper that depict traditional themes, or could the style transcend its material, conceptual, and historical Asian roots to attain more global attributions of modernism, minimalism, abstraction, and contemporaneity?

Generally speaking, the tools and materials of ink art are associated with the traditional thematic endowments of the landscape. But as the group show ‘INK CITY’ at Tai Kwun demonstrates, such registers are no longer the main concern for contemporary artists seeking to reinterpret ink’s aesthetics to reflect urban life, from the paintings of octogenarian Chu Hing Wah, whose training as a psychiatric nurse imbibes studies of city life with an enduring pathos, as seen in the text-based ink on paper work that speaks to the struggles of urban survival To Live, We Have to Work (2017); to younger artist Wilson Shieh, whose ink and watercolor diptych Hong Kong Before 1997 & Hong Kong After 1997 (2017) extends a series in which Hong Kong’s iconic skyscrapers are transformed into costumes adorning figures standing in groups.

‘INK CITY’ attempts to dilate ink art’s scope by focusing on the competence of ink in representing the cityscape and the sociopolitical concerns that run through it, while confronting the banality of the genre’s traditional technique. The semantic attribution of ‘city’ in the show’s title is a deliberate confrontation with traditional ink art landscapes, which suggests that contemporary painters work in urban areas, and thus their maneuvers of ink are naturally candid representations of their surroundings. Reframing the cityscape into the parameters of ink art is undoubtedly an inquiry about the prerequisite link between ink and nature – something that lives on in the late Hong Kong painter Lin Xue’s detailed and charged studies of natural forms showing in the artist’s retrospective at Hong Kong Arts Centre and on view with Gallery EXIT.

So what is the connection between these emergent frames of ink art and its traditional modalities? ‘The Weight of Lightness: Ink Art’, presented by M+ in 2017, attempted to respond to this inquiry by challenging existing tropes and creating links between evolving shifts in style. Curated by Lesley Ma, the show’s inclusive approach revealed a diversity of interpretations, particularly by showing non-ink works by non-Asian artists, such as abstract watercolours from the mid-1960s by Indian artist Krishna Reddy, or works that move beyond ink as a material, like Ni Youyu’s installation, Galaxy (2008-2011), which consists of 300 hammered coins affixed to a wall in the shape of a star chart.

‘The Weight of Lightness’ was not a mere genealogical revision of ink art. Rather, it negotiated the boundaries between materiality, form, and technique. In doing so, the show probed the potentiality of ink art’s future in the expanded realm of contemporary art. That potentiality is also visible in a space like Art Basel Hong Kong, where ink artists are shown in both focused presentations and dispersed among other artistic trajectories. This not only provides an opportunity to reflect on the transformations and developments of ink art across Asia and see how artists have appropriated and circumvented other art forms into their process, but extends the question of how ink art might maintain its uniqueness while coalescing into contemporary genres of art.

Works by Morita Shiryu at Ink Studio and Shibunkaku this year offer a point of entry to this discussion. Shiryu, whose calligraphic performances from the early 1960s onwards will be a focus at Shibunkaku,was the founder and editor of the journal Bokubi, leader of the influential Bokujin-Kai, or Ink Human Society, which he established alongside Inoue Yuichi and other radical calligraphers, and an active member of the Contemporary Art Discussion Group. A pivotal contributor to the artistic landscape of postwar Japan and the field of contemporary calligraphy in Asia, Shiryu was keen to connect the development of ink art with abstract expressionism. The aesthetic enchantment of this approach lies in the merging of western abstract expressionism and the inherited abstraction of calligraphy, opening up a minimalistic proposition for the line itself and making the intricate variations of brushwork and ink more visible. 

From the perspectives of ink art practitioners in greater China, the predecessors of contemporary ink art today saw the practice as a means to forge cultural identity in the face of post-war globalization and modernization, wherein artists needed to catch up with international trends without losing an attachment to their own culture. The Modern Ink Movement of the second half of the 20^th century perfectly illustrates how Chinese artists responded to global trends in art, expanding the language of expression by incorporating more tools and techniques that were seldomly seen in the past, while still seeing themselves as the successors of the ink heritage.

Chu Teh Chun, showing with Alisan Fine Art, is a prominent master of abstract ink art in the modern period, whose works connect and converge cultures of east and west. In particular, Chu exemplified how the ink tradition could be translated through Western visual languages and media, namely abstraction, as did Zao Wou-ki, whose paintings will be shown at Kwai Fung Hin alongside those by Serge Poliakoff, Hans Hartung, Georges Mathieu, Sam Francis, and Lalan, in an exploration of the osmosis between Asian and post-war Western aesthetics in the history of Art Informel. At Grotto Fine Art, works by Yau Wing Fung, Wai Pong Yu, Hung Fai, and Koon Wai Bong reflect contemporary extensions of these legacies, with contemporary ink paintings that express landscapes as fields of chromatic wash, such as Yau’s Floating Mountains II (2019), which becomes further distilled as a minimalist ballpoint cartography in Wai Pong Yu’s A Rhythm of Landscape 2 (2019).

At the same time, artists like Frog King, credited with being one of the first performance artist in China, started to open up the horizons of the ink tradition beyond paper from the 1960s onwards. Prior to spending time in New York in the 1980s, Frog King studied with ink painting master Lui Shou-kwan in Hong Kong – known to have lead the New Ink movement in Hong Kong – and began to expand ink’s representational plane by incorporating its techniques and tenets into installations, conceptual works, and happenings: examples of which will be in focus at 10 Chancery Lane.

For new generations, the dichotomy of east and west has been dissolved by new languages and expressions, whether digital or non-binary, which cannot be linearly traced when compared to the past. Not limited by borders of any kind, artists are candidly navigating a diversity of material and mastery, and their appropriations of and references to western concepts and skills reveal a fluid transference of subject and technique. Take Chris Cheung, an audiovisual performance and new media artist currently presenting a solo exhibition at Hong Kong Arts Centre, who engages new media as a fresh point of entry to traverse the aesthetic culture of ink and wash; while Huang Dan, Lui Qi, and Peng Jian at Ora-Ora demonstrate the manifold manifestations of the form and its interpretations by artists working today, whether from a feminist, literary, abstract, or sculptural perspective.

The conceptual and technical metamorphoses taking place in ink art today endow fresh forms of representation while connecting the legacies of ink art with novel styles and propositions, and innovative mergers between ink and other genres of art, such as sculpture, installation, and digital apparatus, deserve recognition. One example is Bingyi, showing with Ink Studio, whose land and weather works involve recording the natural conditions of sacred mountain terrains in China with ink and water on xuan paper. For Art Basel Hong Kong 2017, the artist worked with installation designer Bricks Li to create an immersive installation of the monumental 2013 work Wanwu for the Encounters sector, resulting in two 22-meter panels installed on two outward-facing slopes.

That amplification of environmental immersion, a deep undercurrent in the ink landscape genre, also comes through in the work of Lin Yan, who will this year present an immersive installation at Art Basel Hong Kong with Leo Gallery made entirely of paper. Transferring the painted landscape into space, the body is transformed into an ever-changing subject grounded in the contours of the present, much like ink art itself.

Kurt, Chan Yuk Keung is a practicing artist and retired professor of the Department of Fine Arts, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.