Exhibition designers eased the Metropolitan’s visitors into this contemporary art experience, first with a suggestive red banner for “Ink Art” on the first level of the Great Hall, then with several galleries of selected contemporary artworks alongside the antiquities that are on regular display.
Here, in the first gallery with contemporary art, on the walls is Qiu Zhijie’s ink triptych 30 Letters to Qiu Jiawa (2009), part of his project about the prevalence of suicides on Nanjing Yangzi River Bridge, the first modern span over the famous river. Hanging from above is Yang Jiechang’s environmental lament, Crying Landscape (2002), with the carved sandstone sculpture Stele with Buddha Dipankara from the Northern Wei dynasty (386–534 CE) in the foreground.
The hanging paintings of Yang Jiechang’s Crying Landscape (2002), created in the style of “blue and green” paintings, or shan shui, first shown at the Venice Biennale in 2003, depict the Palace of Westminster in London, an oil refinery and the great dam at the mouth of the Yangtze Gorges.
The New World Political Map (2000) by Hong Hao, from his “Selected Scriptures” series (1992–2000), silkscreen prints that depict various reconfigurations of the world order. Here the landmasses are renamed—the United States becoming the People’s Republic of China and Brazil becoming the Netherlands, and the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans switching places.
No Chinese exhibition today is quite complete without Ai Weiwei—even though he has never directly engaged with the tradition of Chinese ink painting. His Map of China (2006) is made instead from ironwood from Qing dynasty (1644–1911) temples, a very different kind of recycling of traditional forms.
On the right is one of the earliest works in the show, Gu Wenda’s Mythos of Lost Dynasties Series – I Evaluate Characters Written by Three Men and Three Women (1985), featuring six versions of the character jing 静 (meaning “quiet”), written by his students, over which he then applied the pedagogical red marks of approval and rejection. Through the doorway is Wu Shanzhuan’s Character Image of Black Character Font (1989), his expressionistic riffs on the “big character” style of the Cultural Revolution.
In Gu Wenda’s Mythos of Lost Dynasties Series – I Evaluate Characters Written by Three Men and Three Women (1985), the pioneering artist combined calligraphy with landscape painting in works that do not belong squarely to either tradition.
A detail of Shao Fan’s Landscape (2009), which abandons ink and brush for hatch marks in pencil, as if in an etching.
As with Fan’s Landscape, Liu Dan’s earlier Ink Handscroll (1990) is made with with nontraditional media: here the orange tint comes from cinnabar pigment and hatch marks created with a brush tip. The scroll stretches to more than 17.8 meters in length and the landscape-like form was inspired by the flickers of a candle flame.
Yang Yongliang’s 10-meter-long inkjet print View of Tide (2008) mimics a panoramic scroll of misty mountains, except the hills are made from high-rise apartments and trees are construction cranes—in other words, a contemporary landscape.
Duan Jianyu’s Beautiful Dream 7 (2008) is a view of the iconic “Welcoming-Guest Pine” painted in ink on a cardboard soda case, with Shi Guorui’s pinhole camera panoramic view of Shanghai, China, 15–16 October 2004 (2004) above, already a long-outdated view of China’s commercial capital.
In the Met’s re-creation of a Ming Dynasty courtyard (1368–1644 CE) is Zhang Jianjun’s purplish Scholar Rock (The Mirage Garden) (2008), a jarringly artificial simulation of what is supposed to be a mystically complex form.
A smaller version of a scholar rock is Zhan Wang’s Artificial Rock #10 (2001), which instead of being carved from jade or cast in ceramic is formed in perfectly burnished stainless steel and placed on a side table in a reception room, modeled on a 17th-century one in Suzhou.
A nod to the moving images preferred by today’s artists was a screening room with videos by Chen Shaoxiong, Qiu Anxiong and Sun Xun. Featured here is Sun’s Some Actions Which Haven’t Been Defined Yet in the Revolution (2011), an animation made from woodblock prints.
Huang Yongping’s 15-meter-long Long Scroll (2001) is a self-created catalogue raisonné of his works made from 1985 to 2001, starting from his origins in the Xiamen Dada group to his flourishing as a sculptor. The plane here refers to his “Bat Project” (2001–05) that referenced the April 2001 mid-air collision of an American spy plane with a Chinese fighter jet.
Like many of the artists in the show, Liu Wei was disillusioned by the June 1989 crackdown on peaceful protests in Tiananmen Square, which propelled the artist to a career working in the 1990s genre later dubbed “Cynical Realism.” Here is his accordion album of human debauchery and perverted nature, Untitled No. 6 “Flower” (2003).
Dark in appearance and subtext, Yang Jiechang created the three pieces on the left by daily saturating paper in black ink and applying it to blackened canvases—_100 Layers of Ink, No.1–3_ (1994) is a beguiling yet subversive take on ink painting. More mystical in its outlook, on the right, is Divine Light Series No. 59, The Floating Incomplete Circle (1998) by Zhang Yu.
Liu Dan’s Dictionary (1991) is a beautiful ink and watercolor painting of a 1937 lexicon featuring traditionally written characters. Under Mao’s reign, the Chinese language was converted to simplified characters and inflected with ideological rhetoric.
If you look closely, you can see how Xu Bing devised a complex, tongue-in-cheek system of writing English in the manner of Chinese characters in works such as The Song of Wandering Aengus by William Butler Yeats (1999).
Working with traditional woodblock type, Xu Bing carved hundreds of invented, nonsensical characters, which he would print in scroll- and book-format for the seminal work that became his installation Book from the Sky (1987–91).
A view of the hanging scroll from Xu Bing’s Book from the Sky (1987–91), with more scrolls on the walls.
The rows and rows of printed books, placed on the floor of Xu Bing’s Book from the Sky (1987–91).
A melancholic conclusion to the exhibition is Fang Lijun’s seven-panel woodblock print 2003.3.1 (2003), showing the artist’s signature bald-headed character being subsumed by the waters around him—perhaps a rejoinder to the iconic images of Mao Zedong swimming in the Yangtze.
