Osage Gallery presents its first solo exhibition for the Chinese artist Liang Quan, Life Poetry of Mountain Tea Time, featuring a series of tea-themed recent works by this new ink artist.
Chinese ink painting must reconstruct its traditions, particularly the refined cultural traditions of literati aesthetics. It must approach from the “Dao,” expanding contemporary ink painting through higher principles. The art of Liang Quan has greatly expanded the possibilities of contemporary art through his explorations of the naturalness and emptiness of ink painting.
Liang Quan’s mode of consciousness in ink is the repetition of minute fragments to realize empty tranquility. This is unimaginable within tradition. Liang Quan’s sensitivity towards the minute fragments, the precise control of the encounters between ink and water, the stacking and adjustment of the various color fields and the light coatings of mist come together to form a polyphonic poetry, a painting comprising adjustments. It does not seem, however, that the artist is the one doing the adjusting. Instead, it is the “interval blankness,” that breathing “infrawhite” that invisibly wanders between the strips of paper, that “minute white,” or that “tea color” or “soft yellow” that guides our eyes, or that young and supple green. This infra-white and the color tones are chanting to themselves in a low hum, emitting a faintly drifting aroma.
The works in this exhibition are all connected to the daily activity of drinking tea. They bring painting back to everyday life, which in turn discovers abstract poetry within everyday life. The tea-colored and soft yellow tones allude to the color tones of time. By bringing the colors of tea into ink painting, Liang Quan has effected an expansion of the materials of ink, and infused it with the Zen of tea, reconstructing the traditional form of viewing, a form of viewing that is more akin to savoring the artwork. This is a form of “cultivating observation,” a reading that provides much food for thought.
This exhibition also includes the new media artwork Wellspring, which is a tribute to Liang Quan by young Hong Kong artist Kingsley Ng. The artwork uses water glasses to create the shadows of sundials using water from various countries. They are clearly marked with the date and location (France, Italy, New Zealand, etc.), and serve as a response to the temporality of time through the changing qualities of light from morning to night, alluding to the temporal metaphor in light and shadow. The title Wellspring echoes the relationship between spring water and tea, a yin-yang dialogue that is unique to Chinese culture, a lament on passing and clinging. Water is the clearest material under the sun, and with the poeticism and lowly demeanor of its surface, Liang Quan’s art opens up infinite tension upon an almost nonexistent surface, inspiring the beginner’s eye of the young artist and evoking a response to this tranquil joy of the surface. The encounter between water and tea is the nourishment of blankness, nourishing space and life with blankness, emitting a faint glow from the picture. This is the marriage of qi and light, an art of time.
Image: © Liang Quan, Osage Gallery
