







Artist
WEN Chi
Hsu Yu-Jen
YUAN Hui-Li
CHEN Hsing-Wan
CHANG Yung-Tsun
Teng Pu-Chun
Curator
Andrew PAI
Date
2017.12.16- 2018.3.31
Opening
2017.12.23
Venue
Remarkable Cultivation Art Museum
(No.370, Sec. 1, Linsen Rd., East Dist., Tainan City)
Exhibition Album Launch and Acedamic Seminar
2018.02.24 14:00
Speaker:Andrew PAI, HSU Yu-Jen, TENG Pu-Chun, YUAN Hui-Li
Artist Talk:
Session 1
2018.01.20 14:00
YUAN Hui-Li, XIAO Qiong-Rui, HSUEH Pao-Chia
Session 2
2018.02.04 14:00
Emerson WANG, CHEN Chiao, LIN Hsi-chun
Session 3
2018.03.11 14:00
HSU Yu-Jen, Fang-Wei CHANG
Throughout centuries, ink painting has been searching for its modern values, meanings and cultural roots in the passive, tense international relationship filled with conflicts. However, no matter how artists have tried to find a balance between Eastern and Western cultures, the most difficult issue has been a lack of the extending ability to break free from traditional framework, to be more innovative and to keep up with the changing world. As the world entered the first half of the twentieth century, these problems had become worse as the disorders around the world increased. Struggling among the contentions and fights of different groups, these problems have never really disappeared even after the war. It is not difficult to imagine how ink painting, with thousand years of history, could become completely modernized and revolutionized within a short period of a century. It is as difficult as if someone were trying to debase the feudal system in the past. Therefore, this great task has not been finished even though it is already the twenty-first century.
Is there no other approach to modernize the ink culture except copying and transplanting Western art forms and concepts or attempting to “integrate the East and the West”? Asian societies have undergone centuries of political, social and cultural modernization. Have they acquired the experience of constructing and maintaining the autonomy to create independent, self-determining observation and interpretation? In the contemporary world where the boundary between nations and races are blurred, how do we find cross-cultural possibility that is diverse and tolerant while escaping past dichotomous ideologies that people have been obsessed with, such as “the traditional and the modern,” “the East and the West” and “the conservative and the open-minded”? As a premise, what kind of basic mental and technical requirements does one need in order to explore the contemporary vision of ink painting?
As contemporary societies gradually move towards the goals of “decentralization,” “de-colonization,” “globalization” and “diverse identification,” they need more knowledge and communication to increase tolerance, recognition and respect for each other’s differences. By doing so, a cultural landscape that reflects the cross-disciplinary spirt of the time can be produced. The term “cross-disciplinary” refers to transcending tangible as well as intangible limitations in terms of nation, geography, gender and class, and establishing a channel for dialogue instead of opposition on a more democratic, free and equal foundation. The cross-disciplinary practice in ink painting has become especially important in the formation of contemporary culture. It not only helps to eliminate past confinements of media and functions and frees ink painting from conflicts between heterogeneous cultures in the past century, it also enables a new stage of integration with independent subjectivity.
Therefore, ink art can expand its cross-disciplinary experience in the direction of embracing a global vision, pursuing local and encompassing subjective values and vice versa. In the meantime, it can also develop fluid and constantly growing and changing cultural dynamics to become a site for interpretation and exhibition of contemporary cultural forces; and eventually, this will allow ink art to finalize the construction of its contemporary form and spirit. From this perspective, through the collisions between ancient, modern and contemporary times, ink painting has created an interactive relationship informed with cultural dynamics, which has been continuously evolving and transforming from the systems of “ideal” (sacred belief), to “consciousness” (rational experience) and to “ideas” (creation of the mind, and the combination of the previous two), producing a cyclic rhythm of cultural ecology.
The formation of a certain culture at any era in history, no matter it was which system mentioned above, was produced in dynamics informed with different factors that waxed and waned or collided and resonated together; these factors were also in a cause-and-effect relationship. In a balance of each other’s “restraining force” and “driving force,” it is as if they have created a dynamic connection that functions like a force field. In the process of the latter constantly surpassing the former, breaking the existing, static balance, a new culture could be born. As a result, for ink art that has been caught between the conflicting old and new cultures, the more important thing is to surpass the mutually exclusive relationship between the main theme and its variations while pursuing contemporary values and meanings, and only then, can ink painting possibly embrace both unification and difference at the same time and construct cross-cultural qualities that are diverse and interactive.
Through the theoretical lens of cultural dynamics and its force field, this exhibition examines the variations of ink art in post-war Taiwan. Bringing together the works of artists from different generations, including Wen Chi, Hsu Yu-Jen, Chen Shin-Wan, Chang Yong-Tsun, Teng Pu-Chun and Yuan Hui-Li, audiences can see a dynamic cultural landscape that is constructed by a spectrum of variations, including abstract, structural, minimalistic, installation, video, magic, gender and ecological. Based on the reflection on ink tradition, modern ink painting has renounced imitation and representation by moving towards simplified and symbolic structural forms, pursuing the freedom and purity of materials and forms. Contemporary ink has traversed through the field of media and conceptual dialectics to capture visual spectacles that reflect the state of mind and body and transcend reality while foregrounding the complicated phenomenon of this aloof yet closely connected contemporary society. There exists an interconnecting but independent dynamic relationship between ink art and the contemporary society; and the two have been interweaving the most significant page of cros-culturality in the history of ink painting.