Bingyi: Taihang Rhapsody

EVENT DESCRIPTION

The exhibition presents Bingyi’s latest grand, speculative narrative about art and its relationship to history and politics as reimagined from a woman’s point of view.

The exhibition is presented as the long-lost artworks of Hua, the fictional Northern Song Matriarch of Painting, rediscovered and “archaeologically excavated” by the artist Bingyi from a Song Dynasty temple site in the Taihang Mountains – partly based on historical clues and partly on personal imagination. In Bingyi’s series of speculative reconstructions, Hua is not only a pioneering female artist in Chinese art history but also a visionary philosopher and political thinker. Independent of the great masters of the Song Dynasty landscape painting and the subsequent male literati painting tradition, Hua created an alternative aesthetic system that de-centered the patriarchal, Confucian, brush- and ego-centered mode of literati landscape painting and re-centered the expressive possibilities of brush-and-ink on water, on Taoism, on nature, and on the creative experiences of women.

The exhibition unfolds across the five chambers of the Chantal Miller Gallery, simulating the five main halls of Hua’s Taihang Mountain temple complex. Yet the authorship of the presented works constantly shifts between the artist Bingyi and her fictional persona Hua – by challenging the boundary between the two. The exhibition invites us to contemplate: What constitutes true authorship in ink art? How can we reframe the relationship between historical and contemporary ink art? Where lies the boundary between figuration and abstraction in the language of painting, between the material and spiritual in artistic experience, between fact and fiction in our construction of history and, ultimately, between the dualities within the self?

The exhibition is co-organized by Asia Society Hong Kong Center and INKstudio, and co-curated by Craig Yee and Chris Wan, with support provided by Asia Society Hong Kong Center Gallery & Exhibitions Team, Hain Yoon and Natalie Kung; and INKstudio’s Jiang Yuyi, Hu Jingyuan, and Qing Ruixin.

ABOUT THE ARTIST / ORGANISER

Born in Beijing and educated in the United States, Bingyi received her Ph.D. in art history from Yale University in 2005 where she specialized in the literature and culture of the Han Dynasty. There, she developed her ability to compose texts in various classic formats whether in ancient shijing-style poetry, rhapsodic fu-style verse or ancient guwen-style prose. Bingyi’s journey from scholar to artist began in 2008 when she met the international contemporary art curator Enwezor Okwui who subsequently curated Bingyi’s ink-inspired monumental pencil drawings into the 7th Gwangju Biennale. That same year, Xu Bing curated Bingyi’s oil paintings as part of her New York debut at Max Protech Gallery. Curator Gao Minglu subsequently selected Bingyi’s ink-inspired oil painting for inclusion in his seminal Yipai exhibition at the Today Art Museum in 2009. Wu Hung, through Okwui’s introduction, then commissioned Bingyi’s first monumental, land-and-weather ink painting for installation at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago in 2010. Since then, Bingyi has gone on to work closely with American curators Britta Erickson, Susan Benningson, Hiromi Kinoshita, Leeza Ahmady, Jan Stuart and, most recently, with Susanna Ferrell and Michael Govan at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.