Ink Modernisms

In his opening remarks for 'Ink Modernisms', Alvin Li, Curator of International Art at Tate, framed the symposium’s central questions: ‘How stable is the category of ink art? What kinds of cultural, formal and epistemological assumptions underwrite its institutional treatment? And how might curatorial practice reframe, or even unmake, some of those assumptions?’ I would add to those a core question relevant to both the symposium and the study of ink painting more broadly: ‘Can ink art speak?’

The first panel, ‘Ink In Circulation’, traced the shifting boundaries of the concepts, taxonomies and materialities associated with ink painting. Alan Yeung, Associate Curator of Ink Art at M+ Museum in Hong Kong, opened the panel. Yeung walked the audience through the exhibition Canton Modern: Art and Visual Culture, 1900s–1970s (M+ Museum, 28 June – 5 October 2025), which repositions Canton, long understood as peripheral to Shanghai and Beijing, as a vibrant sphere of cultural exchange and visual experimentation across diverse media extending beyond ink alone, including woodblock prints and comics.1 In the opening half of his talk, Yeung recast ‘realism’ not as mere mimetic fidelity, but as a plurality of image-making modes: forms that respond to shifting political, social and technological conditions, and that can, at times, be ambiguous, symbolic or even abstract.

Yeung’s decentring of realism led to his final enquiry: whether the post‑1949 ideological split between Guangdong and Hong Kong crystallised into a rigid bifurcation of artistic practice. The question, more broadly, speaks to the historiographical contours of postwar ink painting in East Asia. Yeung identified Squid Fleeing Danger by Gao Jianfu (1879–1951) as useful for this discussion. Painted with ink to mirror the squid’s own inky discharge, the work collapses the boundary between medium and motif, yielding an image that is both exacting in figuration and evocative in abstraction. Yeung explored whether this dialectic continued by juxtaposing works by Jianfu’s disciples, who operated in divergent political contexts: Liu Shou-Kwan’s expressive ink abstractions produced from postwar Hong Kong, and Yang Zhiguang’s socialist realist paintings depicting clouds of factory smoke in smudged black ink created from Mao-era Guangzhou. Yeung’s comparison challenged any simple equation of artistic form with political ideology, questioning how postwar ink histories have been shaped by teleological or formalist interpretations.2

Agiluf Chen, Curator at Taipei Fine Arts Museum, extended Yeung’s inquiry about form by examining how medium, as a category, has been historically constructed in East Asia. Drawing on her recent exhibition, Too Loud a Solitude: A Century of Pathfinding for Eastern Gouache Painting in Taiwan, Chen recuperated eastern gouache painting, a time-intensive practice that employed natural pigments and animal glue to build up layers of colour. ‘eastern gouache’ was an alternative term to ‘nihonga’ (Japanese painting) or ‘toyoga’ (oriental painting), which was coined under Japanese colonial rule in an effort to establish a more neutral and politically conscious nomenclature. Despite the term ‘eastern gouache’ having broken away from inherited labels, Chen demonstrated that its perceived tethering to ‘Japanese’ stylistic lineages left its very legitimacy continually in doubt. Taxonomic labels such as toyoga, nihonga, hankukhwa (Korean painting) or guohua (national painting) arose from early twentieth-century colonial entanglements and modernisation efforts that sought to define an Asian artistic identity that contrasted the ‘Western other’ or, at times, to confront internal colonialities within Asia.3 Chen laid bare the disjuncture between such aspirational terminologies and the often unruly realities of artistic practice, asking ‘how can we avoid getting trapped in this identification of the differences?’ Her case study showed that eastern gouache painting, long considered marginal, was in fact deeply intertwined with ink painting and other techniques, revealing productive tensions and hybrid forms. Perhaps more significantly, Chen foregrounded a palpable indeterminacy and in-betweenness operative in these works – one that fundamentally unsettles the very notion of a ‘pure’ medium.

While Yeung and Chen unpacked the conceptual scaffolding that has long defined ink as a medium, the final panellist, Nadia Lau of the Hong Kong Museum of Art, shifted the discussion from discursive frameworks to the molecular infrastructure underpinning ink painting. Drawing on conservation research conducted on the museum’s collection, Lau highlighted how constituent materials – paper, silk and pigments – circulated transnationally through historical trade networks that pointed to a global transmission of material culture that both predated and transcended stylistic and national boundaries. Tracking the layered actions of artists, patrons, conservators and scientific instruments alike, Lau reconstructed ink painting as a material system in circulation. Particularly striking was her emphasis on the reciprocal determination between material and style: how tools and supports not only facilitated but actively shaped artistic outcomes, often more decisively than formal intent. Several historical examples illustrate this dynamic: use of the so-called ‘Western paper’ (actually a Japanese import), whose absorbent surface required a spontaneous ink technique; coarse silk twill, which dictated angular brushwork; and gold-leaf grounds that necessitated the use of mineral pigments rather than organic dyes. Such instances highlight material’s resistance to artistic intent – a shift from viewing materials as passive carriers of meaning to recognising them as active agents in the creative process. This material agency, she further showed, persisted across time, shaping not only pre-modern practice but also the work of twentieth-century painters like Zhang Daqian. In reframing ink painting through the lens of material ‘transhistoricity’, Lau invited the audience to see matter not as culturally inscribed residue or neutral support, but as an active force in artmaking.

The second panel, ‘Transhistoricity’, was chaired by Hera Chan, Adjunct Curator, Asia Pacific at Tate, and turned the discussion toward spatial, temporal, and epistemic shifts in how ink has been practiced and framed. Cai Heng, Senior Curator of Ink at the National Gallery Singapore, presented ‘Transnational Trajectories: A Case Study of Ink Art in Singapore’. She traced a lesser-known trajectory of ink painting in Singapore, a history that invites us to imagine East and Southeast Asia as a new critical region through the lens of ink. From Khoo Seok Wan, a first-generation migrant and leading figure in the Chinese cultural elite, to the influx of Shanghai School painters following the Second Sino-Japanese War, and the arrival of so-called Nanyang School artists such as Cheong Soo Pieng in the postwar period, Cai Heng chronologically mapped how successive waves of Chinese migrants shaped Singapore’s art scene. The more compelling thread in her presentation, however, was not simply about how ink was transplanted into Singapore, but what Singapore itself made possible: the kinds of artistic transformations, reorientations and conceptual departures enabled by this unique geopolitical and cultural space.

Among artists adapting local subject matter or motifs into ink, the most striking example was Chen Wen Hsi, whose Storks c.1991 was discussed at the end of the presentation. Beneath a cubist-inflected abstraction of bird forms, a blank area in the lower left corner – liubai (negative space) – draws attention to a formal tension between two pictorial traditions.4 The coexistence of these traditions creates a productive dissonance that reflects Singapore itself: a site where contrasting aesthetic systems can confront, rather than resolve, one another.

The following two presentations, though grounded in distinct case studies, converged on a shared methodological fault line in the study of ink painting today: the crisis of medium-based essentialism and the linguistic frameworks that continue to sustain it. Shelagh Vainker, Curator of Chinese Art at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, offered an overview of the Ashmolean’s history of collecting Chinese ink paintings since the 1960s while reflecting on the responsibilities and limitations of a historic museum context. Vainker’s presentation was anchored in a central question: how might such collections be activated, displayed, and made resonant for contemporary audiences? Surveying the museum’s recent engagements with works by Cai Guo-Qiang and Xu Bing, Vainker questioned whether the ink category remains analytically or institutionally viable as these artists deliberately operate across media or within conceptual registers. Are such works simply bridges back to the museum’s historic holdings, or might they open onto deeper questions about ink’s place within and against contemporary art?

Eugene Wang’s paper deepened these questions through a case study focusing on Irene Chou, a leading figure in Hong Kong’s new ink movement.5 Opening with an analysis of Purple Universe 1996 – a painting whose organic forms and intense violet-blue palette evoke a psychedelic quality rarely associated with ink painting – Wang challenged common interpretations of new ink artists as either inheritors of Chinese cultural essence or variants of Euro-American abstraction. Instead, Wang proposed that both Chou and her teacher, Liu Shou-Kwan, were deeply inflected by biomorphic aesthetics, as theorised by figures such as Herbert Read.6 Wang’s reading of Chou’s works as pictorial biomorphism moved beyond East/West binaries, showing how ink artists drew on diverse conceptual frameworks. Through this lens, Wang challenged not only what ink painting has been but what it might yet become.

Together, the panels revealed that ‘ink painting’ is not a stable category – and that this instability is productive rather than problematic. The symposium pointed towards a shift from viewing ink as a self-contained medium to understanding it as fluid practices, continually reshaped by regional, material and institutional forces. How might we bring this shift about? Undoubtedly, it will demand a methodological reorientation: from medium essentialism to relational praxis, from notions of cultural purity to interregional networks. In his presentation, Wang called on the audience to ‘reinvent the wheel’, urging a diversification of the linguistic frameworks through which ink is understood. This may offer a response to my initial provocation: ‘Can ink art speak?’ If so, we may begin to cultivate the language – whether through transnational, gendered, material or technoscientific lenses – that allow us to truly listen.