Conversations | Ink and Miniaturism: Bridging Histories of Painting from East to West Asia
Art Basel Hong Kong 2023, March 24
Artists share the traditions they reference in their work to explore the histories of ink and miniature painting in Asia from a trans-regional perspective; from the emergence of religious pictorial art in South Asia and its transmission via Central Asia to China in the 3rd Century along the Silk Road, to Yuan Dynasty cultural exchanges with the Moghul and Ottoman courts, and revivals of Persian and miniature painting in the 20th and 21st centuries.
‣ Tseng Chien-Ying, artist, Ink Studio
‣ Amir H. Fallah, artist, Denny Gallery
‣ Wardha Shabbir, artist
‣ Moderator: Craig L. Yee, Co-Founding Director, Ink Studio, and Yeewan Koon, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Art History, University of Hong Kong
‣ Tseng Chien-Ying employs the historical materials and methods of jiaocai and Nihonga painting from China and Japan in an interrogation of normativity. Using a “queer” sensibility, Tseng inverts or transgresses received notions of normal/abnormal, good/bad, beautiful/ugly, desirable/undesirable using the religious iconography of the sacred and sacrilegious. In 2017, he was awarded an Individual Fellowship by the Asian Cultural Council to research early Buddhist mural paintings and sculpture at heritage sites throughout China.
‣ Amir H. Fallah creates paintings, murals, sculptures, and installations that explore systems of representation embedded in the history of Western art. His ornate environments combine visual vocabularies of painting and collage to deconstruct traditional notions of identity formation, while simultaneously defying expectations of the genre for portraiture by removing or obscuring the central figure. He has exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions across the United States and abroad. Selected solo exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson; South Dakota Art Museum, Brookings SD; Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland OR; San Diego ICA; and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland KS.
‣ Wardha Shabbir is a Lahore-based visual practitioner and contemporary miniaturist. She is also an educator, having taught at her alma mater, the National College of Arts in Lahore, from 2013-2021, most recently as a Visiting Assistant Professor. Shabbir has exhibited widely on national and international platforms. She was the first artist from Pakistan selected for FLACC Belgium, where she initiated a research-based experiment on the human sensorium while transforming a two-dimensional miniature painting into a three-dimensional interactive environment.
‣ Craig L. Yee is a co-founding director of INKstudio, a Beijing and New York-based gallery and experimental art space devoted to researching, documenting and exhibiting ink as a medium, language and discourse for the creation of contemporary art. Yee’s research interests include the visual semiotics of ink and comparative approaches to contemporary and pre-modern philosophy, science, and aesthetics.
‣ Dr. Yeewan Koon is associate professor and Chair of the Department of Art History at the University of Hong Kong. She has published numerous works including Nara Yoshitomo (2020), “A Chinese Canton? Painting the Local in Export Art (2019) and A Defiant Brush: Su Renshan and the Politics of Painting in 19th Century Guangdong (2014). She is the recipient of several research awards including a Fulbright Senior Fellowship, American Council of Learned Scholars, and visiting scholarships at Cambridge University and Columbia University. Koon also works in the contemporary art field as a critic and curator.
This talk will be conducted in English, with simultaneous interpretation available in Cantonese and Mandarin.
The Art Basel Hong Kong 2023 Conversations program is curated by Stephanie Bailey.
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