Inking a new future

Wen Jing, an ink painting by Liu Qinghe.

Huang Chih-yang, 49, a Taipei-born artist now living and working in Beijing, constructs a modern, digital landscape in Three Masks?? Movement, a painting of ink and mineral color on silk. He was inspired by the Chinese painting manual Jieziyuan Huapu to create fish-like marks that move in different directions. He distributed them all over the painting just like rows of decimal digits.

Huang, however, dislikes to be known as an ink artist, because he also works with many other mediums.

"Shuimo is used as a tag. People just feel it necessary to be categorized and tagged, which I think is meaningless," he says.

Yin says ink art traditions are deeply rooted in individuals, whether they embrace it or reject it. "Artists do not need to replicate (ink art traditions) to save them. To create and to push boundaries are how the tradition can live on."

And to achieve that goal takes years of hard work for an artist to find his own way. If not, the new shuimo can become "superficial, fads and fashions", according to Britta Erickson, artistic director of the Beijing-based Ink Studio that focuses on promoting ink painting.

Erickson curates This Is Still Landscape Painting, an exhibition currently at the Ink Studio that shows "disturbing but beautiful" ink works by Yang Jiecang, 58, an artist from Guangdong province who now divides his time between France and Germany.