Tina Keng Gallery at Art Basel Hong Kong 2024｜Booth 3E08: Art Fair

For the 2024 edition of Art Basel Hong Kong, Tina Keng Gallery is pleased to present Wang Huaiqing, Su Xiaobai, Yuan Hui-Li, Sopheap Pich, Peng Wei, and Su Meng-Hung. In West-dominated contemporary art world, six artists on the other end of the cultural spectrum provide a vantage point that allows scrutiny of their own heritage while deconstructing Asian aesthetic philosophy. Amidst the inheritance and dismantling of classics, they articulate a distinct Asian context that resonates with contemporary artistic expression.

Trained under the advocate of Western modernism Wu Guanzhong, Wang Huaiqing (b. 1944) always carries with him a sensitivity and sentimentality unique to Chinese culture and literati. His work reveals a layered sensibility that stems from traditional Chinese cultural training: a rational spirit rooted in rich sentimentality, and a pursuit of sensuality within rational composition. In the hands of Su Xiaobai (b. 1949), the traditional medium of lacquer, steeped in Asian history and aesthetics, transmutes into a nuanced vocabulary of abstraction. Evoking a sense of wabi-sabi, the texture of lacquer exudes a warmth that transforms the dialogue between craftsmanship and contemporary art into a cross-cultural classic. For Sopheap Pich (b. 1971), the connection to nature serves as his inspiration. The Cambodian native employs locally sourced materials, such as bamboo, rattan, burlap, mineral pigments, and metal, to create abstract geometric forms, suffused with a warm moistness reminiscent of the tropical forest, and an essence of nature, lived experience, and creation.

With her solid classical training, Yuan Hui-Li (b. 1963) goes beyond traditional ink painting and calligraphy, integrating ancient and modern approaches in her use of media. Ink art expands under her brush from purely visual into a new realm of synesthesia, where smell, hearing, touch, and the spirit coalesce. One of the notable artists in China, Peng Wei (b. 1974) is known for her ability to conjure a spirit of centuries-old tradition through a contemporary visual vocabulary comprising intricate brushwork and subdued palette rendered on flax and rice paper. Engaged in a dialectic of gender and Chinese literature, she examines her own culture while pondering femininity and her role in today’s China. Working across painting, silk-screening, installation, and sculpture, Su Meng-Hung (b. 1976) transforms traditional flora and fauna painting into cultural symbolism with a sensorial dimension, where appropriation and sampling ceases being mere satirizing and popularizing of social codes, and become a direct reference to the taste of the literati and aristocracy.

The deconstruction of Asian contemporary art from a pan-Western perspective no longer serves as a way to distinguish artistic expression today. As contemporary art becomes increasingly globalized, Asian and Western art parallel in their cultural, philosophical, and artistic approaches, mutually independent yet mutually illuminating. Tina Keng Gallery presents the works of six artists who integrate Asian and Western influences in their diverse practices that rise above the confines of a single cultural framework in an attempt to weave a tapestry of artistic possibilities.