Department: Tate Modern Curatorial
Hosts: Alvin Li, Curator, International Art, supported by Asymmetry; Elsa Collinson, Assistant Curator, International Art; and Hera Chan, Adjunct Curator, Asia Pacific, supported by Asymmetry
Hong Xian, Moonland 1970
Courtesy Harvard Art Museums
Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College
Tate’s commitment to develop more expansive understandings of twentieth century art production, encompassing artists working with traditional materials and practices, has led to the emergence of ink art from the Asia Pacific region as a significant acquisition and research priority.
During her Fellowship, Youngshin responded to Tate’s commitment to expand its ink collection, contributing to research around forthcoming acquisitions, exhibitions and displays. She considered methods by which Tate’s recently acquired ink paintings could be made accessible to the public, introducing the materiality and language of ink to new audiences.
Youngshin’s expertise in Korean ink artists enabled Tate to expand its geographical remit in relation to avenues of potential acquisition. Furthermore, her research offered new perspectives on ink art. Exploring the intersection between ink painting, gender and craft, Youngshin’s research demonstrates how women ink artists’ formal and material approaches challenge patriarchal, masculinist framings of ink painting that have privileged technical virtuosity and metaphysical ideals in postwar Korea and other parts of Asia.
In June 2025, the international closed-door symposium Ink Modernisms was hosted by Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational. Youngshin’s report from the event considers questions raised both by speakers and by her own enquiry. How stable is the category of ink art? What kinds of cultural, formal and epistemological assumptions underwrite its institutional treatment? How might curatorial practice reframe, or even unmake, some of those assumptions?’ And, can ink art speak?
Biography
Youngshin is an art historian who studies the media history of artistic labour through gendered and decolonial lenses. Her research and dissertation explore ways to reimagine ink painting as a malleable medium, rather than one confined by traditionalism or ethno-nationalism, and to reposition it within modern and contemporary art history.
Youngshin recently published an article in Orientations, on the ink abstractions of Hong Xian (Margaret Chang), a female member of Fifth Moon Group in post-war Taiwan. Youngshin is currently serving as Associate Editor of Primary Documents: Korea, a forthcoming anthology of critical writings on modern and contemporary Korean art from the Museum of Modern Art, New York.