Born in the 1960s in Guangdong, Li Gang practiced traditional Chinese painting and printmaking since he was small. After years of experience in experimenting with traditional Chinese ink painting, the artist transformed his deep understanding of Chinese culture into new artistic concepts to revive the soul of ink and to redefine and promote its new significance. He worships and honors ink painting while merging it into his own wisdom, so that it is reborn as a ritual of ink. Ink is the spirit of Chinese civilization that we have long loved and cherished. Through its evolution, ink has broadened in form while its spirit remains unchanged.
Li Gang has abandoned the traditional “brush” and uses “imprinting” as his painting medium. He attempts to break away from the accepted and classical “S” shaped structures, the relation between sparseness and thickness in brush and ink, and the principles of resemblance and difference. Through folding papers, sprinkling water, soaking the papers in ink, spreading them on a flat surface, tearing them apart and creasing the strips for patchwork etc., he has developed his most personalized images in ink.
