Art Central Hong Kong features Top Chinese artist’s "Ink Monument"

PanARMENIAN.Net - Lan Zhenghui, one of China’s leading contemporary artists, debuts his majestic new installation Ink Monument at Art Central Hong Kong presented by Ethan Cohen New York, on view through March 26 at the iconic Central Harbourfront, Art Daily reports.

Commissioned by Art Central’s selection committee, Lan Zhenghui’s installation towers more than five meters high, with colossal four-sided column of large-scale ink paintings on rice paper. The artist created his new master-work to express the power of sadness and an epic awareness of tragedy. After Hong Kong Art Week, the artist will next embark on a U.S. tour that includes a second residency at Mana Contemporary co-sponsored by Ethan Cohen Fine Arts, and university lectures in multiple cities.

This is the second year that the Art Central selection committee has invited Lan Zhenghui for a major installation. At 2015’s Hong Kong Art Week, Ethan Cohen curated Lan’s Re-Think installation which was very well received in Hong Kong and was a highlight of the Art Central fair (the entire installation was acquired). Lan is renowned for taking the freehand strokes of traditional Chinese painting to electrifying new levels by infusing them with the abstractions and expressiveness found in modern painting. “The focus of my work is the profound consideration and the emotion of the ink,” says Lan Zhenghui. “What makes this new installation completely different for me is that I have been challenged by dimensions required by the selection committee and translating this into the necessary sense of space - to then construct a dignified phenomenon of transcending tragedy, representing the mortality we all face. I would have liked to reach higher to even greater heights.”

The source of the Lan’s inspiration is derived from ink. Occupying the esthetic confluence between traditional Chinese Ink painting and Western abstract expressionism, Lan Zhenghui’s work reinvents both. He lets the ink follow and discover its own momentum in bold, kinetic, strokes. He has liberated ink from being determined by form. But the spirits of Chinese landscape linger like ghosts in the canvas. They haunt both the process – the brushstrokes, the vectoring – and the resulting shapes. Mountains, rivers, storms, even figures, surge and evaporate subliminally.

Ink Monument can be seen at Art Central’s Section P-10. Additional work by Lan Zhenghui can be seen at Art Central’s Booth B-5, presented by Ethan Cohen New York.