The Gwangju Museum of Art has invited the Chinese contemporary artist Zhang Yu to hold an exhibition. An important figure in the development of China’s contemporary art, Zhang Yu is a major originator and founder of the experimental ink wash movement of China’s contemporary art history, which had begun in the late 1980s. This exhibition, which will demonstrate the arts theory and arts worldview which Zhang pursues, is greatly significant as the first of the artist’s to be held in Korea.

Chinese society of the 1980s was in a period when politics, culture, arts and new concepts had entered from the West through open-door reforms, and its politics, economy, society, culture and arts, etc. met directly with an era of enormous changes. The area of the arts, as well, was naively faced with the shock of Western contemporary art, and any worn artistic rules of China came to be challenged. The 85 New Wave Art Movement, which arose in such context, provided the springboard for new theories of contemporary art to be deduced. The area of Chinese ink wash painting has also come to seek a new point of transition in such a situation. I.e., the traditional ink wash painting of China directly faced strong shock regarding Western contemporary arts, leading to contemporary explorations of ink washing painting.

Chinese contemporary arts of the 1990s have brought great changes in line with social changes, and experimental ink wash painting began to garner interest in being of a contemporary transition of Chinese ink wash arts. Experimental ink wash artists including Zhang Yu came to seek various expressive methods in diverse ways with the theme of contemporaneity, and they ultimately insisted that what ink wash arts wish to show is not the material or technical, forms or the so-called brush-ink, but the spirit of ink wash.

*image (left)
Finger print (1991)
© ZHANG Yu 

Courtesy of Gwangju Art Museum