Taihang Rhapsody 太行赋
2022-2023
Ink on paper 纸本水墨
370 x 1200 cm
The central masterwork of Bingyi’s Taihang series is the eponymous Taihang Rhapsody, 2022-2023, a truly monumental and immersive eight-panel work 3.7 meters high and 12 meters wide. Flanked by single panel landscape compositions inspired by the real Taihang landscape—as in Secluded Forest in Flying Waterfalls 幽林飞瀑图—by historic masterworks such Dong Yuan’s “Riverbank”—as in Chaos Opens 混沌初开—and by ancient masterworks lost to history but recorded in art historic texts—as in Cold Mountains in Dancing Snow 寒山飞雪图—the entire installation is a temple both to Nature and to the history of Chinese landscape painting with the Taihang Mountains serving as the central subject and context in both cases.
Secluded Forest in Flying Waterfalls 幽林飞瀑
2021-2023
Ink on paper 纸本水墨
367 x 144 cm
This landscape compositions is inspired by the real Taihang landscape and is a single panel that flanks the central masterwork of Bingyi’s Taihang series, Taihang Rhapsody, 2022-2023. Along with Chaos Opens 混沌初开 and Cold Mountains in Dancing Snow 寒山飞雪图, the entire installation is a temple both to Nature and to the history of Chinese landscape painting with the Taihang Mountains serving as the central subject and context in both cases.
Chaos Opens 混沌初开, 2022
2022
Ink on paper 纸本水墨
366 x 144 cm
This landscape compositions is inspired by the real Taihang landscape and is a single panel that flanks the central masterwork of Bingyi’s Taihang series, Taihang Rhapsody, 2022-2023. Along with Secluded Forest in Flying Waterfalls 幽林飞瀑 and Cold Mountains in Dancing Snow 寒山飞雪图, the entire installation is a temple both to Nature and to the history of Chinese landscape painting with the Taihang Mountains serving as the central subject and context in both cases.
Cold Mountains in Dancing Snow 寒山飞雪图
2021-2023
Ink on paper 纸本水墨
367 x 144 cm
This landscape compositions is inspired by the real Taihang landscape and is a single panel that flanks the central masterwork of Bingyi’s Taihang series, Taihang Rhapsody, 2022-2023. Along with Secluded Forest in Flying Waterfalls 幽林飞瀑 and Chaos Opens 混沌初开, the entire installation is a temple both to Nature and to the history of Chinese landscape painting with the Taihang Mountains serving as the central subject and context in both cases.
As part of Bingyi’s larger body of work, Dream within a Dream within a Dream, which comprises of a series of handscrolls and classic texts, this work describes the Matriarch beginning her journey with a baimiao painting of a feather which symbolizes the fragrance of the dream, then continues into the main scene where the character Chunyu Fen 淳于棼 “Chenyu the Confused” sleeps underneath a giant pagoda tree with the king and his alter ego embracing each other as a cloud sitting on a rock while the two diplomats who received Chunyu into the unknown country named Pagoda hide in a cave. The third part of the handscroll is a text that the Matriarch wrote in ancient guwen style which raises the ultimate question: Do we really understand who we are, what we see, or where we come from?
Bingyi’s third solo show with the gallery debuts her latest grand, speculative narrative about Art and its relationship to Nature, Literature, History and Politics as retold or reimagined from a woman’s point of view.
Bingyi tells her story through two bodies of work resulting from her investigations over the past five years into the origins of the ink monochrome landscape in China: The Eyes of Chaos: Temple of the Matriarch of Painting—the organic development of Bingyi’s land-and-environment art practice into historical landscape painting; and Dream within a Dream within a Dream—a speculative, archaeological reconstruction of the life of Hua, the “Matriarch of Painting.” Hua, it turns out, was not only a visionary woman artist but a philosopher and political thinker who, in the Northern Song, created an alternative aesthetic system that de-centered the Patriarchal, Confucian, Brush-centered and Humanistic mode of literati landscape painting and, from a Woman’s point of view, re-centered the expressive possibilities of brush and ink on Ink and Water, on Taoism and on Nature.
An architectural designer, curator, cultural critic, and social activist, Bingyi has developed a multi-faceted practice that encompasses land-and-environmental art, site-specific architectural installation, musical and literary composition, ink painting, performance art, and filmmaking.
Kelly Wang and Ren Light Pan: New Material Practices in INK Art
March 14 – 22, 2024
Kelly Wang (b. 1992) and Ren Light Pan (b. 1990) are two emerging New York-based women artists who are redefining the material practices of Ink art. In one of her featured paintings, Brush Rest, Wang uses newspaper twisted into strands and sculpted into two-dimensional and three-dimensional landscape forms to transform the normally passive, absorbent ground of ink art—namely, paper—into an active, material inquiry into human society and nature. In contrast, Ren Light Pan, in her Sleep series paintings, uses the heat of her body and the physical, material properties of ink and water—namely, diffusion, absorption and evaporation—to indexically record her physical body in its sleeping state.
