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Exhibition

Oneness: Nature & Connectivity in Chinese Art

July 30, 2022–October 29, 2023

Explore the questions of “what is nature?” and “what is the relationship between humans and nature?”. This exhibition features the work of four contemporary artists whose practices examine the boundaries between humans and nature from a philosophical, spiritual, and material perspective. All the featured artists embrace and adapt historic Chinese artistic traditions through their chosen materials, process, or themes.

Oneness: Nature & Connectivity in Chinese Art shows that we are all connected, that our lives are closely linked with nature and how that impacts our world and environment. Works by Ming Fay, Tai Xiangzhou, and Wang Mansheng are shown in Gallery 321, while a large installation of ink paintings by Bingyi is featured in the Chinese Reception Hall, Gallery 326, and a series of related interventions is displayed in Gallery 334.


Main Building

About the Artists

Bingyi 冰逸 (b. 1975)
Beijing- and Los Angeles-based artist Bingyi has spent decades creating mountain-and-river sized ink landscapes. Bingyi directly engages climate and topology in her creative processes, and her work bridges the categories of ink art, land art, and performance art. For example, she has dropped “ink bombs” from a helicopter to create a monumental-scale painting at the Shenzhen Bao’an Airport and replaced a disappearing waterfall with an ink-cascade. Bingyi also engages with digital media combined with architectural design, urban planning, filmmaking, poetry-writing and multi-media performances.

Ming Fay 費明杰 (b. 1943)
Ming Fay’s work explores the questions and emotions that spring from encounters between humans and nature. His oversized sculptures of fruit, bones, and shells; hybrid plant sculptures; and immersive garden installations draw on his understanding of nature as both the source and the product of human needs and desires. Born in Shanghai and raised in Hong Kong, Fay has lived, studied, and taught across the United States since 1961. The subjects, conceptual approaches, and historical references in Fay’s work reflects his life-long engagement with Chinese and American artistic practices and ideas about nature.

Tai Xiangzhou 泰祥洲 (b. 1968)
Tai Xiangzhou is a Beijing-based painter and art historian who uses texts and painting to investigate and transform the landscape painting tradition of China. Celebrated for his atmospheric landscape ink paintings on silk, his work addresses ideas about cosmology and Chinese philosophy, while also drawing on the materials, techniques, and styles of the landscape paintings of China’s 10th-14th centuries. Tai earned his Ph.D. from Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Wang Mansheng 王满晟 (b. 1962)
Wang Mansheng is a modern-day scholar-artist who is internationally renowned for his painting, calligraphy, and writing. He was born in Taiyuan; studied classical Chinese literature at Fudan University, Shanghai; and worked in the 1980s in Beijing at China Central Television. Since 1996, he has lived in New York. A resident of the Hudson River Valley, he draws inspiration and painting materials from his surrounding natural environment. A virtuoso ink painter, Wang reimagines and reinterprets historic scholarly painting subjects, such as pine trees and rocks, for our contemporary world.


Sponsor

Oneness: Nature and Connectivity in Chinese Art is made possible by The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Global.

Curators

Hiromi Kinoshita, The Hannah L. and J. Welles Henderson Curator of Chinese Art; Gabrielle Niu, former Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow

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