Paths of Contemporary Chinese Ink Art

Abstract

Given Jizi’s statements of intention, what do his ink-wash paintings actually look like? How do his works and concerns compare with those of other contemporary Chinese ink artists? Put another way, the question for us is whether Jizi’s art contributes to a community of artists who have similar interests in upholding an indigenous Chinese aesthetics, depicting the unification of self with nature, and expressing spiritual contact with a larger universe beyond observable phenomena. He takes a clear series of steps to arrive at his Dao of Ink Series of 2009. These stages of development bring together four features: spatial reversals or interchanges of figure and ground, enclosed interior expanses, multiple dimensions, and interlocking areas. After studying this progression to a culminating style of interlocking dimensions with differing interiors, we can consider his work in relation to three Chinese artists at work today: Jia Youfu (b. 1941), Liu Guosong (b. 1932), and Xu Bing (b. 1955). With the aid of art historian Jason Kuo who offers a vocabulary of useful artistic attitudes and categories, we have a manageable framework to guide our analysis. The comparison reveals that Jizi combines a wide range of ink-art styles and practices: continuation of Chinese-style landscape, synthesis with Euro-American styles, and experiments with ink and paper that result in artworks that are intentionally unreadable as symbols that refer to understandable things. His compositions are unorthodox because they display closed contours, interchanges of space, and fragments of diverse dimensions that combine features of traditional Chinese painting, modern abstraction, and the anti-writing exhibited in some contemporary installations of Chinese ink art.