The Tina Keng Gallery is pleased to announce our participation in ART 021. For the fair’s 2019 edition, we present the works of four artists: Ava Hsueh (b. 1956), Yao Jui-chung (b. 1969), Peng Wei (b.1974), and Su Meng-Hung (b. 1976). Through their respective practices in abstract painting and new ink art, the four artists exemplify the diverse styles of Greater Chinese contemporary art nurtured in a globalized context.
Ava Hsuehhas long used abstract language as her means of expression. In dexterous biomorphic and geometric abstractions, she creates a hybrid reality that corresponds to epochal shifts in contemporary abstract art. The artist’s dynamic brushwork imparts to her canvases an Eastern allure. The black contours not only exemplify the captivating quality of calligraphy, but also form a sort of natural landscape. What lies behind the dimension of imageries are the visible and invisible depths of temporal and spatial fields, achieved through her interweaving of lines and planes that cradle the pigments’ luster and warmth. Through her layered compositions, the charm of East and West blends with gradual expansion of aesthetics and consciousness. Hsueh continues to search for a way to present today's reality through abstract language, while exploring the various possibilities of contemporary abstract art.
Yao Jui-chung, Peng Wei, and Su Meng-Hung further transform the aesthetics of traditional Chinese landscape, literati, and flower-and-bird paintings. Yao Jui-chung’s idiosyncratic landscape paintings boast resplendent landscapes, accentuating absurd narratives, which rebel against classic ink painting. Yao’s solo exhibition Vimalā-bhūmiis currently on view at the Tina Keng Gallery in Taipei. In the two years that have elapsed since Yao’s last solo exhibition, he had encountered a series of unexpected events — separations, withdrawals, and departures. Having just celebrated his 50thbirthday, he faces his life with a renewed perspective. Once impure thoughts have been dismissed, one can begin the act of creation with renewed inspiration and pure vision. One of his latest works, his eight-panel screen Vimalā-bhūmi: Tomiriis on view at this year’s Art021 as the central piece of our booth.
Seemingly shifting away from ink tradition,Peng Weifocuses her exploration in contemporary aesthetics on ink, and further transcends tradition. Her work revolves around the past of art, including the wisdom, memories, sorrows, and sense of reality found in ancient work. Her new series “Peep” is an extension from last year’s narrative paintings Seven Nights. Enlarging specific details of Seven Nights, the artist limns these scenes in colored ink on oval-shaped silk in the “Peep” series, transforming the oval shape into a lens through which the viewer quietly peeps. Rooted in traditional literati painting, her work incorporates everyday epiphanies and female reflection into elegant and delicate ink paintings, portraying the soft yet persevering spirit of Chinese literati.
For Su Meng-Hung, if anything after being translated could leave behind either a stunning signifier, or an absurd signified because of a romantic misunderstanding, this would come awfully close to what art is in reality. Su’s solo exhibition Xiang Nai Ertook place in June at the Tina Keng Gallery in Taipei. Inspired by Ms. Chanel’s collection of ebony lacquer screens, Su takes famous Chinese paintings as templates, fusing abstract expressionism with automatism manifested in splashed ink landscape. In crafting the sensory and material character of his work, Su develops an ambiguous visual style, often eluding the true implications of his referents — as seen in the still life paintings, flower and bird paintings, and the erotic paintings referenced by him — by detaching and fragmenting them. In re-contextualizing these symbols, he dissociates them from their original historical and cultural significance. The artist arranges them into a naive, flamboyant scene, taunting society with vulgar symbolic gestures and a sense of confrontation and ridicule.
Firmly rooted in Greater Chinese modern art, the Tina Keng Gallery’s mission is to unearth artistic classics from the bygones of history, and champion Greater Chinese contemporary art. What motivates us is not an ostensible representation of Asian art, but the task of nurturing a contemporary aesthetics that encapsulates Asia’s cultural flux.