Hong Kong show out to redraw image of ink art as genre in thrall to its glorious past
Influenced by Western ideas of what makes art new, many people struggle to see today’s ink art as contemporary. A new exhibition by city’s M+ museum of visual culture aims to change that by setting it in a wider cultural context
The past can be a burden as much as an asset.
Take ink art: it is an intrinsic part of east Asian aesthetics, philosophy and so much else in the region’s cultural make-up because it is a sophisticated and powerful system of expression that has survived for thousands of years. Yet the conventions and techniques that bind today’s ink artists to their forebears can make it hard to define their contemporaneity, especially in a world dominated by a Eurocentric idea of what makes art new.
This month, the first ink art exhibition organised by Hong Kong’s M+ museum of visual culture will reveal just how it intends to make its collection resonate with today’s audiences.
“The Weight of Lightness: Ink Art at M+” features around 60 pieces by 42 artists from more than 10 countries. According to Lesley Ma, the M+ ink art curator, the genre needs to be examined from a radically international perspective that takes it well beyond its Chinese roots.
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“We want to show that boundaries are more porous, that different cultures have more commonality than we may think,” she says. She is not dismissing the relevance of ink art’s history, but she wants to place it within the context of a world in which ideas and people have always travelled, and where ideas and expressions can overlap through sheer serendipity.