ARCOlisboa 2026: Archipelago of Art Histories: Irene Chou
ARCOlisboa is Portugal’s leading international contemporary art fair, gdm will participate in the fair's ninth edition with a special presentation of Irene Chou, pioneer of the New Ink Movement of Hong Kong, in the curated program "Archipelago of Art Histories" by Cosmin Costinas, from 28-31 May 2026.
ARCOlisboa - Booth I05
CORDOARIA NACIONAL
Av. da Índia 1300-598
Lisboa, Portugal
Archipelago of Art Histories
Curatorial Text by Cosmin Costinas
The artists gathered here share a commitment to working through and with inherited forms as methods for interrogating how bodies and materials carry memory and knowledge, across multiple artistic languages that together offer a more complex picture of our present world than a single lineage of art ever could. These presentations make visible historical flows of different intensity, and ask what it means to work in a formal language, and what political and spiritual work is performed by the continuation of that art historical inheritance in the present.
To speak of an archipelago is to embrace a geography of distinct, sovereign formations, each with its own internal logic and history of transformations, yet organised in inescapable connections with each other. It reaffirms that art history is plural and that its many streams carry equal weight and depth. The six artists in this section have developed practices rooted in specific traditions and communities, and each of them operates within a system of entanglements, between the different strands of art history, between the sacred and the political, as well as between inherited technique and the fundamental role of personal agency and artistic imagination.
Belonging to the same generation, Irene Chou (1924-2011) was one of the most original artists of her time that worked within the vast tradition of Chinese and East Asian ink painting. Born in Shanghai and arriving in Hong Kong in 1949 amid the upheavals of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, she encountered a city in the process of inventing its own cultural identity, while being a key preserver of traditional Chinese artistic lineages, threatened by the cultural revolution on the mainland. She became a central figure in the New Ink Painting Movement, developing a practice that contributed to ink's journey through the questions of art in the twentieth century and its own participation in the waves of abstraction. Chou’s investigations were interior as much as social, extended explorations of what the brush stroke could become when driven by something closer to the body's own energy than to codified technique. Working with the "one-stroke" method, her forms evoke cellular biology, cosmic systems, sexual allusions, and the unconscious in equal measure.
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What connects the six practices across their differences of place, lineage, as well as generation is a shared condition and a shared method. Each of these artists has inherited a form that was marginalised in some way, suppressed or instrumentalised by colonial power in one of its many guises, whether the Francoist dismissal of craft, the Eurocentric canon's indifference to Chinese ink tradition, the continuous atrophy of Tibetan cultural heritage, the colonial and touristic regulation of Balinese art, the erasure of pre-Columbian material culture, or the silencing of Afro-Brazilian sacred traditions. And each of them has found in that marginalised inheritance a resource to think with and a set of tools for understanding the present and for imagining what their art histories with their genealogies of form, still have to say.
The archipelago affirms its islands. It honours their distinct profiles, their different depths, their particular histories of storm and settlement. What it proposes is that we learn to navigate between them.
Full text --
https://www.ifema.es/en/arco/lisboa/galleries/curated-programmes
