Alisan Fine Arts is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition Ink Alchemy: Beyond Tradition at their gallery during Art Basel, co-curated by Dr. Susan L. Beningson and Daphne King Yao. Ink Alchemy: Beyond Tradition includes new work created for the exhibition by established artists Zheng Chongbin, Imagined Landscape: Rabbit made by Yang Yongliang to celebrate the Lunar New Year, and emerging artists Zhang Xiaoli, Cheuk Ka-Wai, Cherie, Kelly Wang, Ren Light Pan. Other works by Lui Shou-Kwan, Wang Tiande, Lee Chun-Yi, Zhang Jian-Jun, Tai Xiangzhou, Zhang Yu, Lin Guocheng, Zhang Yirong and Chu Chu will also be on show. Featuring 15 Chinese artists from Hong Kong, mainland China and the US of different generations and varying backgrounds, the exhibition seeks to highlight the changes in Chinese ink painting over the last half-century. They move beyond the tradition, adopting innovative materials and ways of creation yet maintaining the spiritual energy of ink or qi.

Landscape Reinterpreted
Landscape as a traditional subject of Chinese ink painting, its artistic essence has rarely been about realistic depiction, but spiritual resonance or the reflection of the state of mind and personality. Inheriting the core spirit of ink art and landscape, the artists further transformed ink landscape painting with new mediums, materials and composition, responding to their reality and imagination through Chinese landscape context of human feelings and literary culture. The section features Lin Guocheng’s three-dimensional surreal landscapes, Tai Xiangzhou’s Cosmoscape paintings, Wang Tiande’s landscape created with burn marks from incense sticks, Kelly Wang’s abstract landscapes that exist somewhere between two and three dimensions and combine contemporary and pre-modern materials, Yang Yongliang’s digital realistic Chinese landscape and Zhang Xiaoli’s boxed landscape inspired by a dicing game from the Song dynasty. By experimenting and creating landscape paintings based on different themes and through various mediums, these artists show a contemporary facet of this time-honoured subject.

Exhibition opening: March 20th, 5pm-7pm
Artists Talk: March 24th, 11am-12:30pm

Gallery address: 21/F Lyndhurst Tower, 1 Lyndhurst Terrace, Central