Body, Space and Sound: Ink Art at M+ Museum’s “The Weight of Lightness”

by Julee WJ Chung

At the M+ Pavilion in Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District, a poster reproduction of YANG JIECHANG’s Mustard Seed Garden III (2010) graces the entrance to “The Weight of Lightness: Ink Art at M+.” All photos by Julee WJ Chung for ArtAsiaPacific.

In Hong Kong, M+ executive director Suhanya Raffel introduced the museum’s first presentation of ink art, “The Weight of Lightness,” as “a culmination of M+’s perspective on collecting and exhibiting ink art to date.” Displayed throughout the walls were nearly 60 highlights from the museum’s permanent collection, making full use of the institution’s provisional exhibition space, M+ Pavilion’s tight upper-floor gallery.

The transnational show that covered ink artworks from the last six decades was presented in three thematic sections: “Scripts, Symbols, Strokes” explored how artists have investigated and deconstructed the traditional medium of ink and the calligraphic script through new manners of gesturing, mark-making and drawing; “Desire for Landscape” examined how artists have continually used the East Asian painting tradition, and what M+ ink art curator Lesley Ma calls “the enduring appeal of landscape painting” as an active source of inspiration for their creative expressions; “Beyond Material” focused on how artists have transformed the legacy of ink through imaginative investigations that probe the “materiality of ink, water and paper” in their paper-based works and new-media creations, marking a radically different interpretation of the age-long tradition in contemporary society.

The ambitious show, albeit compact in its display, is timely in its survey of the region’s variegating expressions of ink, and remarkably presented and orchestrated with new public programs that reinterpreted the traditional medium of ink art within the East Asian region and beyond: “Imageries in Sound” was a highly selective playlist curated by Lei Liang—a professor of music at the University of California, San Diego—featuring compositions created since the mid-20th century inspired by the ink medium. Viewers could access the visual exhibition’s audial companion through the M+ website, or through the free headsets that could be rented at the pavilion. Another notable addition to the exhibition was a commissioned dance program “TransforMotion,” led by Hong Kong choreographer and dancer Allen Lam and costume artist Virginia Chu, that takes inspiration from the ink works within “The Weight of Lightness,” as well as a performance by students from the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Art’s School of Dance in late November.

The exhibition takes inspiration from the Korean-American artist NAM JUNE PAIK’s Wurzel Aus (1961). Paik juxtaposes the use of a permanent marker against a hanging scroll, and uses the square root symbol to allude to the endless possibilities of art. M+ ink art curator Lesley Ma describes this work as a “provocative and playful homage to the ink tradition, which encapsulates [the artist’s] philosophy of art in his early career.”

The first section, “Scripts, Symbols, Strokes” begins with TONG YANG-TZE’s gigantic calligraphic work Spirited, like a far-journeying steed; Floating, like a duck on water (2002), a work with powerful and expressive brushstrokes that remain faithful to the Chinese language, yet flirts with the limits of the orthodox tradition of calligraphy with abstraction.

Japanese artist MORITA SHIRYŪ’s Manaita (1963) depicts a character from a Japanese proverb “Manaita no ue no koi,” meaning “a carp laid on the chopping board.” This quasi-abstract work captures the materiality of the ink medium, while alluding the artist’s anxiety of feeling naked and subjected to the public eye like a fish laid out to be butchered.

XU BING’s seminal work Book from the Sky (1989) was shown beside MORITA SHIRYŪ’s ink painting, exemplifying how abstraction works in many ways. While Shiryū’s calligraphy is hardly discernable through its watery brushstrokes, Xu’s characters are nonsensical glyphs that strongly resemble Chinese characters. By creating over 4,000 unreadable characters based on rules outlined in the Kangxi Dictionary, which was the standard Chinese dictionary in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the Song typeface that is customarily used in printed Chinese documents, the artist created a four-volume “ancient” text collection that is meaningless to the reader, communicating a reaction to the artist’s youth in Maoist China, as well as commenting on China’s sociocultural context of the 1980s, and how textual and linguistic systems can obfuscate knowledge.

Écriture No. 10–72 (1972) is a monumental canvas created by PARK SEO-BO during the nascent stage of what was later known as the Dansaekhwa art movement. To create this work, Park pushed still-wet white oil paint around the large canvas in repetitive motions with a pencil, as if he were writing in cursive Roman script. His minimalist abstractions explore the materiality of drawing and painting, producing a relief-like surface, while also investigating the rhythmic motions of writing in his visceral gestures.

A surprising cluster of works appeared in ”Scripts, Symbols, Strokes.” Shown here from left to right is Chinese artist QIU DESHU’s Seal (1982), which features ink and seal marks on paper; Indian artist KRISHNA REDDY’s watercolor on paper works Formation (1964) (above) and Untitled (1965) (below); and American-German artist NICK MAUSS’s glazed ceramic slab Untitled (2012). This collection of transnational and multimedia works demonstrates how artists within and beyond Asia were exploring similar ideas of mark-making, drawing and abstract expression.

Chinese artist WUCIUS WONG painted this work of ink and color on paper in 1990. Distant Thoughts #19, although created with ink under the East Asian aesthetic, is actually a painting that depicts the Englewood Cliffs in the Palisades along the Hudson River in the Northeastern United States. The work, displayed in the section “Desire for Landscape,” marks a break from the orthodox tradition of ink painting, with its use of geometric lines that move the viewer’s eye throughout the composition. The painting shows the myriad Eastern and Western influences Wong was exposed to throughout his artistic career and training, including his educational background in modern design theory.

Painted by a younger artist born in the 1980s, The Six Principles of Chinese Painting—Transmission IV (with Hung Hoi) (2015) by HUNG FAI reveals the burdens and tensions of ink’s tradition that is passed down through generations. The artist invited his father and renowned landscape painter HUNG HOI to paint a large rock—a symbol of endurance and solidity—with the red mineral pigment cinnabar on paper, which HUNG FAI then sandwiched between four layers of dampened paper, tracing the contours of the red rock with a black fountain pen. The red and black ink seeped through the pages, creating their own uneven dots and marks across the page—alluding to the faithful inheritance of artistic tradition between tutor and pupil, and complex emotions and shifting power relations between father and son.

Hong Kong artist FROG KING KWOK’s Fire Painting, Butterfly (1978) was featured in the “Beyond Material” section, illuminated from behind with a light box, unveiling the layers and materiality of paper. Using a combination of burnt paper and ink painting, the artist references the Taoist sage Chuang Tzu’s dream of himself as a butterfly, and depicts the delicate energy of transformation of an “insect born from metamorphosis.”

Near the end of the exhibition, the audience is led into a room of “stars”—an installation created by Shanghai-based artist NI YOUYU. Galaxy (2010–11) places the viewer within a constellation of flattened coins that were collected from around the world. Upon them, the artist has painted miniature landscapes and objects to represent what he calls “a galaxy of human knowledge,” simultaneously stripping the coins of their monetary value and endowing them with quiet scenes of transcultural significance.

Julee WJ Chung is ArtAsiaPacific’s assistant editor.

“The Weight of Lightness: Ink Art at M+” is on view at the M+ Pavilion, Hong Kong, until January 14, 2018.

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