Pearl Lam Galleries presents The Art of Line: Contemporary Chinese Ink and Brush, a group exhibition which explores how China’s ancient pattern of seeking cultural renewal through the reinterpretation of past models remains a viable creative path, through the lens of lines as an aesthetic preoccupation in Chinese their art.
The exhibition showcases works by six Chinese contemporary artists: Lan Zhenghui, Qiu Deshu, Qin Yufen, Qiu Deshu, Wang Dongling, Wang Tiande, and Zhang Wei. Although each of these artists have transformed their sources through new modes of expression, visitors will recognisze thematic, aesthetic, or technical attributes in their creations that have meaningful links to the centrality of line that has persisted from ancient to contemporary times in Chinese art.
Abstraction and reduction are at the core of traditional Chinese artistic consciousness. Over the course of art history, categories such as “existence and non-existence”, “form and spirit”, “qi and dao” all have their origins in abstraction and reduction. The Chinese artistic spirit has consistently sought a high degree of abstraction, distilling or condensing an object to its simplest and purest form, and its most essential and unadorned lines. Abstract line also gives rise to a boundless spiritual world of connotations and emotions.
In his treatise on Chinese written characters in “The Process of Beauty”, Mr. Li Ze Hou states his belief that the form of Chinese written characters (character form) has attained independence from their symbolic meaning (word meaning) and maps out its own developmental trajectory. In this long process of growth, ‘the beauty of line became further distilled— – even more than the decorative patterns on coloured pottery, the curved and straight movements and spatial configurations of freer and more diverse use of lines expressed and conveyed a variety of formal and structural attitudes, emotive interests, vigour and strength, eventually forming a distinctively Chinese art of line: calligraphy.’
Showcasing works by six artists who reinvent sources drawn from the fertile landscape of China’s artistic development, be it the lines in decorative motifs of coloured pottery, bronzes and jades, or in the later calligraphy, painting and Buddhist sculpture, this exhibition explores the ways in which Chinese art can be viewed as an art of line.
-Pearl Lam Galleries Singapore
Image: © Zhang Wei
Courtesy of the artist and Pearl Lam Galleries Singapore