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Avant-garde ink-wash baffles and intrigues
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To call Wei Qingji’s experimental ink-wash different is an understatement, it’s extremely different and very intriguing. He uses areas of white wash, silhouette, pencil drawing and ink-jet printing; he rubs, scratches, saturates and mixes ink and wash “to conjure up the meaning of life and fate.”
While many experimental ink-wash artists eliminate realism and figures, Wei frequently depicts figures, a hand, a foot, a wing, a horse, a lion, a wolf poised and howling atop a huge black bone. Wei calls them special symbols, not just a horse, or a hand.
“You don’t have to understand what these works really mean,” he said of his exhibition underway at M50 artists’ hub through November 17. “That’s my job.”
Experimental ink-wash painting was a small art movement in China in the mid-1990s, and Wei, now age 42, is one of the youngest among the group.
Born in Qingdao, Shandong Province, Wei majored in traditional ink-wash painting at Nankai University in Tianjin and earned a post-graduate degree in mural painting at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Bejing in 2003.
His experimental works have a strong visual impact, evoking graffiti, cartoons, myths and Western abstract paintings from the 1970s and 80s.
“These symbols reveal the artist’s wide reading and we find historical context, popular culture, pop art, fashion and political competition in these works,” says exhibition curator Pi Daojian. “Some imply the political reality ignored by the people and yearn for mankind’s pure wild nature, which is gradually vanishing.”
Wei himself has a hard time describing the relationship between his work and traditional ink-wash paintings.
“Perhaps the ambience permeating my paintings comes from tradition,” he says.
Traditional ink-wash painting pays more attention to aesthetic appeal, while modern ink paintings, as a modern art concept, do not take aesthetics as the ultimate goal. It becomes a public discourse based on personal experience. What I care about is the relationship between the traditional and the contemporary era, even though it’s vague and ambiguous. That’s why it’s appealing.”
Date: Through November 17, 10am-6pm
Address: Rm 217, Bldg 4, 50 Moganshan Rd
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