"Ink Dreams: Selections from the Fondation Ink Collection"
Venue: Resnick Pavilion, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Exhibition Period: 19 September - 12 December 2021
Galerie du Monde is delighted to share that Hong Kong artist Fung Ming Chip's 2015 work Accidentally Passing, Needle Script is featured in group exhibition "Ink Dreams" at LACMA.
Beyond the concrete materials of ink and paper, there is an intangible spirit uniting works of East Asian ink painting. But how does the spirit of ink translate to other mediums, global makers, and contemporary times? Comprising photography, sculpture, video — and, of course, painting — Ink Dreams proposes a new view of ink art for the contemporary era, one that incorporates qualities from the ink painting tradition and new adaptations of traditional subject matter, unbounded by traditional materials.
Featured artwork:
Accidentally Passing, Needle Script (2015)
Chinese ink on xuan paper, 181 x 96 cm
Excerpt from the exhibition catalogue:
Fung Ming Chip is a self-taught renaissance man, immersing himself in artistic fields ranging from writing and directing to calligraphy and seal carving. His youth was spent in Hong Kong, and in 1977 he moved with his family to New Jersey, near New York City. In 1986, he moved to Taipei, and wrote and directed five plays throughout Taiwan. Since 1986, he has divided his time between Taipei, Hong Kong, and New York, three hubs of contemporary Asian and global art.
In his painting practice, Fung is a reformer of calligraphy, morphing a millennia-old tradition into a practice reflecting contemporary life. His invented scripts, of which he says he has over 100, include sand script, created by blowing dried ink powder - ink sand - over characters written in only water; swirl script, characterized by looping lines; and post-marijuana scripts, which are variable in aesthetic but often include thick, overlapping brushwork. In his needle script, as seen in LACMA's "Ink Dreams" exhibition, Fung considers the spatial relationships of both characters and individual strokes, blurring the divide between the interior and exterior spaces of the characters. On a flight between New York and Asia, he scrawled the poem that inspired the work:
Accidentally Passing
Strong or weak spirit
Follow the whirling engine
Steadily corssing the equator
Quantity quality and pattern are overpowered
Fooling the physical structure
Confusing time and focusing distance
Inverting moon and star
Freezing ideology
Existing will
Exceeding body's limit
36,000 feet up
Looking down at living earth
Searching for unknown future
Looking over to sky
Shrinking eternity
Thinking ahead
Why is there no darkness
(English translation of original Chinese)
Two seals are visible in Accidentally Passing, one in the lower left corner and the other on the upper right. Fung began seal carving in 1975, and as is true in much of his artistic practice, has bent and broken the rules of the tradition, often using unconventional shapes, adding images (likening the seal print to a miniature block print), and allowing his characters to trespass over the confines of the seals' carved boarders.
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Ink Dreams is the first presentation of work from the Fondation INK Collection, a 400-piece collection of contemporary art in the spirit of ink that was promised to LACMA in 2018. The exhibition examines the impact of ink on the global contemporary art world, and features works by artists from Asia, Europe, and North America.
Learn more --
https://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/ink-dreams
