Ink Paintings
by Lyu Sheng Chen
DEC.7th, 2024 - FEB.28th, 2025
Ink walks together with water, integrating or resisting each other all the way. And the traces they left, depict a universe of art.
The inclusive water, combining with the steady ink, produces fantastic compatibility to link any color and all kinds of materials, making the appearances of painting more variety, and maintains an extraordinary characteristic that is obviously identified as ink-painting.
However, as such an open and distinguishable art form, ink painting seems has never stood under the spotlight of the Modern Art since the 20th century.
Even till now, when I talk about ink painting, words like “stuffy”, “antiquated” occur to my mind. And it seems not active enough in contemporary art-market as well. What makes the so called Water-and-Ink paintings being a situation today? Is it bias? mis-guide by marketing? or disadvantage of itself?
Y Gallery is set to host series of exhibitions, inviting artists and experts to talk about the questions above.
With great honor, the series exhibitions will begin with works by Mr. Chen Lyusheng, through which he will explore an experiment with the visitors about the way out of the art theories.
I hope the Y gallery would be a meet-point of the traditional art of ink painting and the cosmopolitan city of Hong Kong, and a start-point for a journey of contemporary ink painting to the outside world. It’s similar to the sign “Y” shows.
Fellow Artist's Commentary
Such Jiangnan-style pieces were attempted by Deng Ke several decades ago. That was the taste of late spring in Jiangnan - beautiful and gentle, like the happy smiles of Suzhou girls. The later Yang Mingyi gave broader interpretation and representation of Jiangnan. The presence of fog produced a sense of distance that gave rise to a kind of appreciation for "poetic barrier."
Lyusheng was born in the Jiangnan region as well. He leads people to meditate on one feature after another. He invites you to enter a corner of a window, a kitchen or a lane so that you would feel like a resident rather than a tourist. You then begin to imagine that you grew up here, went to school here and got married here. You wear very plain clothes and have a cute and obedient daughter at home. At the place where you went through a lot of sorrow, you mourn for she love shat could no longer continue and the debt of grace you could never repay. . .He carefully guides you, with the light touches of Ni Yunlin more typical than Ni himself so that you may “produce remembrances that you have never had before", as Tolstoy put it when he was defining music.
<Nostalgic Feelings for Jiangnan> By Huang Yongyu
