The exhibition features 20 new works by Wei Ligang, one of China's most distinguished and avant-garde artists specialising in contemporary Chinese ink painting and one of the original artists featured in the pioneering 2002 exhibition at the British Museum, London.
Chinese ink painting and calligraphy, executed with a brush and ink on paper, has been at the heart of Chinese culture for 2000 years and is the foundation stone of Chinese civilization. Traditionally it was regarded as the most important and hierarchic of the visual arts with a rigorous structure of pictorial conventions. It was not until the 1980s that modernist practitioners were able to break away and experiment to produce today's diverse and exciting manifestations of ink painting. These continue to draw from the classical canon whilst constantly challenging traditional boundaries in order to make work that is relevant and meaningful to today.
The new Chinese ink painting has until recently remained primarily the aesthetic domain of scholars and sophisticated collectors, but is beginning to attract much attention from collectors in and outside of China. "Over the past 15 years I have focused increasingly on the development of the awareness in the west of Chinese contemporary art and I have come to believe that the area of contemporary ink painting or the New Ink Painting, as it is called in China, is particularly rich in its pictorial range. It is now the area of Chinese contemporary art that provides collectors with not only the best 'value' in financial terms, but a foothold in what is certainly one of the most exciting intellectual developments in modern China", commented Michael Goedhuis.
Wei Ligang, formerly a physicist and well-known mathematician, was born in Datong, Shanxi in 1964, and has been at the forefront of contemporary ink painting since 1981 when as a student of mathematics he became president of the Calligraphy Society. Wei went on to teach both subjects, but in 1995 he moved to Beijing to concentrate on his art. His training in mathematics has deeply influenced his particular abstract form of calligraphy, deconstructing and re-forming characters in his paintings which still subtly evoke memories of the classical past.
His works presented in this exhibition demonstrate the subtle distortion of the classical Chinese calligraphic characters to complete abstraction while at the same time continuing to retain a deep connection with Chinese culture. The essence of his work reflects the effort to create a new pictorial language that addresses the cultural imperatives of today's world and of course to today's China.
Highlighting the exhibition is Ye Fang Chui Xiao Ke, Chun Deng Mei Jun Lou (On my way to the clarinettist in the night, I passed a well-lit wine shop), 2010, an ink and acrylic work on paper illustrated above. Also of particular interest is an exquisite portrait image featuring a series of undulating vertical stripes entitled Thirty-Six Concubines Grey, executed in 2008 in ink and acrylic on Xuan paper and measuring 360 x 145cm. A smaller, bold work, that clearly demonstrates Ligang's links to calligraphy is Shi Gu (Ten Partridges) painted in ink and acrylic in 2010 and measuring 180 x 96 cm.
Wei Ligang also has a profound understanding of western art expressed in his long aesthetic dialogue with friend Brice Marden in the US, but his painting remains unequivocally Chinese. Wei's objective is to provoke in the viewer a profound recognition of the transformation now taking place in Chinese aesthetics.
Also showing in the Bloomfield Terrace Project Space is a selection of works by Yao Jui-chung.
