INK ART: Past as Present in Contemporary China

This winter I went to see the first exhibition of Contemporary Chinese art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.



The impressive yet modest collection of big names such as Cai Guo-Qiang, Ai Weiwei, Xing Danwen, and Zhang Huang are mixed with new emerging artists and the museum's existing collection of historical materials such as Chinese ink painting materials.

Ink Art examines the creative output of a selection of Chinese artists from the 1980s to the present who have fundamentally altered inherited Chinese tradition while maintaining an underlying identification with the expressive language of the culture's past.

- The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Perhaps because of the understandably uniform, monochromatic color scheme of the featured works, the exhibition takes on a noticeably somber undertone. Videos by Qiu Anxiong feature desolate landscapes and grotesque scenes spliced with sexual imagery to form uncomfortably miserable montages, all the while animated to old songs from Revolutionary China. Themes include the urban congestion and fears for dilapidation, isolation, and dehumanization of future societies. Still others prefer quiet meditation with Buddhist symbolism.

While top-selling artists who practice in Political Kitsch and Political Pop (most recently Zeng Fanzhi, who sold a record-setting painting in 2013)¹ exclaim their views through vibrant colors and overt political symbolism, Ink Art offers alternative ways to project critical perspectives without saying a thing. Perhaps most compelling was Zhang Huang's Family Tree, in which the names of his ancestors are written on his skin in successive stages, until they eventually subsume the his entire face and identity; which is of course, an interrogation of the Chinese tradition placing importance of kinship and bloodlines.

Danielle Wu


¹Jason Chow. “Zeng’s ‘Last Supper’ Sells for Record $23.3 Million at Sotheby’s Auction.” New York Times, October 6, 2013.