Curated by the eminent Pi Li, directed by Wang Huang Sheng, the Director of the Museum of the Central Academy of Art and co-organized by Galerie du Monde, the solo exhibition of Li Gang’s Chinese contemporary ink paintings, Transmission and Imitation, has been successfully held at the Today Art Museum, Beijing in June 2012. This exhibition will now be presented at Galerie du Monde, Hong Kong, from September 13, 2012 to October 10, 2012. The exhibition will show works from the artist’s latest series, “The Elements of Ink and Wash”.
Born in the 1960s in Guangdong, Li Gang practiced traditional Chinese painting and printmaking since he was small. After years of experience in experimenting with traditional Chinese ink painting, the artist transformed his deep understanding of Chinese culture into new artistic concepts to revive the soul of ink and to redefine and promote its new significance. He worships and honors ink painting while merging it into his own wisdom, so that it is reborn as a ritual of ink. Ink is the spirit of Chinese civilization that we have long loved and cherished. Through its evolution, ink has broadened in form while its spirit remains unchanged.
Li Gang has abandoned the traditional “brush” and uses “imprinting” as his painting medium. He attempts to break away from the accepted and classical “S” shaped structures, the relation between sparseness and thickness in brush and ink, and the principles of resemblance and difference. Through folding papers, sprinkling water, soaking the papers in ink, spreading them on a flat surface, tearing them apart and creasing the strips for patchwork etc., he has developed his most personalized images in ink.
In the series, Li creates abstract and square compartments, symmetrical lines that come close to a perfect balance in the thickness of ink, patchworks that have been jumbled and rearranged, and the contrast and dialogue between different materials. These touches constitute his understanding and expression of ink art in the contemporary realm. Li’s series can be called “experimental” works, while they are also an extension of the poetics of Chinese ink. The extension of such poetics is not simply manifested in water and ink, but also a reversal of materials, texture, imagery, and paintings and the intellectual realm.
The renowned curator, Pi Li suggested that Li Gang’s use of “imprints” as the main structure in creating his paintings with the imprints of actual objects, or the folding of xuan papers to form rhythmic patterns with the result of such methods being manifestations of the meaning of “the moving imprints”. In Li’s works, “ the moving imprints” does not only reveal the exchanges of consciousness and imagery in his inner world, but also the interaction between the outside world ( existing objects), the consciousness of the inner world (concepts) and imagery (abstract language). They are the “imprints of the heart” during an industrial era, and they embody a contemporary dimension.
According to Wang Huang Sheng (Museum curator of CCA and an artist himself), Li has elevated this “experience” of artistic creation into “cultivation” in his everyday life. It is exalted into a way of living, a means of cultivation towards a higher realm in life. The ink, traces of life, emotional states and higher realms in life, may all become a new stage in Li’s development, and an expression of his “cultivation” through the journey of life and existence.
