









Curator
Hui-Ching HSIEH
Opening
2018.3.10 14:00
Venue
Chini Gallery
Among the mainstream expressive forms of Western conceptual art and new media art, how do artists preserve thousands of years of Chinese ink painting tradition while integrating Eastern and Western artistic features to create the new look of contemporary ink art? In Spring Tide – Solo Exhibition of Cindy Ng presented by Chini Gallery in March, contemporary artist Cindy Ng uses her signature techniques and expression to bridge the gaps in Chinese ink art, demonstrating innovative interpretation and fresh representation of the traditional art form. Artworks featured in the exhibition include her ink paintings, abstract color prints on glass as well as videos. Ng transforms and represents the aesthetic and philosophical concepts in Chinese ink tradition, which has existed thousands of years, and reveals a fresh wave of contemporary ink creation.
The scholar of Southern Qi period, Xie He, put forth the “six principles” of ink painting in his The Record of Classification of Ancient Painters, which had a tremendous impact on the artistic style of Chinese ink art. The six principles are “spirit resonance,” “bone method,” “correspondence to the object,” “suitability to type,” “division and planning” and “transmission by copying,” among which “spirit resonance” is prioritized as the foremost principle. Therefore, whether it was the ink landscape that peaked in the Song dynasty or the literati painting that matured after the Yuan dynasty, spirit resonance as well as artistic mood are always the highest goal that traditional Chinese ink painters have been pursuing. Instead of aiming to realistically represent specific landscape or to capture the changes of light and shadow as Western painters have been doing, they closely observe the vast nature and landscape to delineate the impression in their minds and the essence of the scenes and objects.
Ng transforms and represents the philosophical concept and artistic mood embedded in traditional Chinese ink painting through contemporary media. By combining Eastern and Western visual elements, she is able to convert the philosophical concept and aesthetic thinking, such as “spirit resonance” and “poetry in painting,” and finalizes the “contemporization” of ink painting after the end of modern ink painting. The chemistry and combination of Eastern aesthetic philosophy and Western contemporary artistic vocabularies and techniques have given birth to fresh and innovative sense of beauty and artistic mood.
Spring Tide – Solo Exhibition of Cindy Ng features more than twenty artworks by the artist and is the first collaboration between the artist and Chini Gallery. In the meantime, Chini Gallery has also invited independent curator, Hsieh Hui-Ching, to curate the exhibition, which systematically introduces Ng’s creative career and changes in recent years. For the curator, with the dynamic expression of video, Ng’s video works innovatively represent the artistic mood and spirit resonance that are essential to the Chinese ink tradition. In Ng’s videos, the artistic mood of ink paintings is visualized in a dynamic way while ink and various colors freely flow and integrate. They are ink landscape paintings that are constantly changing, unfolding a unique sense of beauty and artistic mood. The ink in the works flows and changes with the music and the image, making audiences curious and look forward to the subtle variations that will take place in the next second. In short, her videos resemble moving poems.
Born in Macau, Cindy Ng grew up and studied in both Macau and Hong Kong. In 1998, she moved to Taiwan, where she lived and continued art-making for a decade. She now lives in Beijing, and since her last solo exhibition in Taiwan, ten years have passed. Spring Tide opens on March 10 and ends on April 15. The exhibition will showcase the representative works created in the past decade by this remarkable contemporary artist