Ceramic Meets Ink

With the Korean artist Young-Jae Lee and the Chinese artist Chen Guangwu, the gallery presents two great Asian masters and the encounter of classic Asian media: ceramics and ink on Xuan paper.

In the Berlin Museum of Asian Art, Young- Jae Leehas recently been shown with her installation ‚Bins - 313 Jars’ while Chen Guangwu has been represented at the same time with ‚Preface of the poems composed at the Orchid Pavilion’.

The museums curator Uta Rahman-Steinert wrote about the ceramist Young-Jae Lee: ,similar to a musician who interpretes a composition, the artist puts her personality into the delicate molding of only apparently similar role models, whom she implents complexion and concurrently lends it a face. This might be her position combining her East Asian origin: an expression of her individual creativity about molding, altering and modifying existent basic shapes. Hence she absolutely evades the enforcement of reinvention of the form itself and proves that permanence contains a highly potential mutability.’

Herein may to be found the cognition to the Beijing based artist Chen Guangwu. As an autodidact and conceptual artist, he found further analysis of essential, in China effective cultural influences: of Confucianism and Maoism. Based on his daily buddhist meditation the artist develops minimalist large scale ink painting. Even as a radical minimalist Chen Guangwu remains a conservative calligrapher whos work consists of repeated and apparently similar words.

The exhibition realizes a first encounter between these artists. Over 300 smaller and bigger jars – containing a bundle of 2006-2007 previously shown in the exhibition ‚1111 Bowls’ at Munich’s Pinakothek – form an image on the ground which is in correspondence to the ink paintings within three gallery rooms.

Alexander Ochs: ‘almost twenty years after my first invitation to China and as a result of almost 14 years of gallery experience this may be the most Asian exhibition we ever produced.’

Uta Rahman-Steinert will inaugurate the exhibition.