Ink Dreams: Selections from the Foundation Ink Collection

This exhibition was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

This exhibition is made possible through the generosity of the Fondation INK. All exhibitions at LACMA are underwritten by the LACMA Exhibition Fund.

Major annual support is provided by Meredith and David Kaplan, with generous annual funding from Terry and Lionel Bell, Kevin J. Chen, Louise and Brad Edgerton, Edgerton Foundation, Emily and Teddy Greenspan, Marilyn B. and Calvin B. Gross, Mary and Daniel James, David Lloyd and Kimberly Steward, Kelsey Lee Offield, Mr. and Mrs. Anthony and Lee Shaw, Lenore and Richard Wayne, Marietta Wu and Thomas Yamamoto, and The Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation.

Composed of elegant, dynamic dances between the black ink and white acrylic, Zheng Chongbin’s monochromatic paintings are the result of a conglomeration of theories and aesthetics pulled from Western and Eastern artistic canons. Through his practice, Zheng explores the fundamental elements which make up our world, including recurring geometries present in both macro and micro structures within the cosmos. Complementary pieces, Dissolved Geometry C and Dissolved Geometry B are symbolic of the numerous dualities found in the natural world.

© Zheng Chongbin, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva

In an early work by gu wenda, surrealist landscape #3, the indiscernible forms and disordered lines are reminiscent of works by Wassily Kandinsky, while certain combinations of forms and lines resemble characters in the ancient seal script of Chinese calligraphy. They are, however, detached, synthesized, misplaced, overlapped, miswritten, negated, and inverted. The character-like forms challenge and inhibit the viewer’s attempt to ascribe meaning. The notion of “unreadability” here paved the way for the artist’s fully developed creation of pseudo-characters.

© gu wenda, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva

In order to create the deep black pigment that defines his Hundred Layers of Ink series, Yang Jiechang paints layer over layer of rich black ink over his paper—here building up a textured fingerprint—punctuated by a top layer of shimmering glue. The result is a magnified marker of his identity, one in a set of five large-scale fingerprint paintings. Yang sees himself as a new literati artist, and ink is equally foregrounded here as a part of his identity.

© Yang Jiechang, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva

In his Divine Light series, Zhang Yu sought to erase any trace of his own identity, consciously painting in a way that disguised his brush strokes and choosing a subject disconnected from his own lived experience: a mysterious primeval light. He sees these works as an experimental combination of ink art and Western techniques, which he used to explore the boundaries of ink painting.

© Zhang Yu, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva

This oil painting was based on a photograph in the 1920s or ’30s. Capturing a mundane moment, the scene shows rickshaws from behind as they move up the street. Shop banners blow in the wind, the characters on them barely legible. Mimicking the out-of-focus effect of an old black-and-white photograph, the painting evokes a sense of nostalgia. The blurriness contributes to the sensation of an ephemeral moment eluding the viewer like a faded memory.

© Chen Bolan, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva

In this piece, the sun has already set on the glum scene. As our eyes adjust to the darkness, a construction site comes into view. A herd of sheep meanders among bare pillars of poured concrete, appearing out of place and lost. Here, Wang Gongxin bears witness to the rapid transformation of his hometown, Beijing, following the late ’80s and early ’90s reforms. Wang blurs boundaries between old and new, urban and rural, reality and memory.

© Wang Gongxin, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva

In this diptych, natural forces and the passage of time become active participants in the creative process. On the left, the characters “mountains and waters” or simply, “landscape” (shanshui) can be clearly read. On the right, they are almost entirely erased by the forces at work. Landscape painting in water and ink takes concrete form as three manifestations of water: landscape (“mountains, water” or shanshui), ink (“ink water” or moshui), and ice (“ice water” or bingshui), together spelling the title of the piece.

© Dao Guangyu, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva

Born out of a collaboration with the Singapore Tyler Print Institute, Lin Tianmiao’s Seeing Shadows series (2005–12) combines large-scale photographic prints with her signature material of white thread. Known for her thread-bound sculptures, Seeing Shadows presents a rare foray into two-dimensional wall-hanging artwork for Lin.

© Lin Tianmiao, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva

Hiroshi Sugimoto is one of the most gifted photographers active today. In creating this series, Sugimoto referenced early experiments with electricity by such pioneers as Benjamin Franklin and William Fox Talbot. In 2009 the artist set up in his darkroom a 400,000-volt Van De Graaff generator which sent bolts of electricity through film onto a metal table while he manipulated the sparking bolts with metal kitchen utensils. The resulting images often resemble vascular systems and highly-energy cosmic events.

© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, photos: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva

© The Liu Kuo-sung Archives, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva

Liu Guosong’s Moon Series was inspired by images of Earth taken by astronauts on Apollo 8. Daybreak incorporates an actual image as a collage. These two works were made with the “Guosong paper” the artist invented by attaching to a paper’s surface the thick, long plant fibers that are thrown away as waste in the papermaking process. After painting on both sides of it, he peeled off the long fibers, revealing the white parts underneath.

© The Liu Kuo-sung Archives, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva

Impressed by the colorful water in Jiuzhaigou in Sichuan Province, China, Liu invented his zimo technique. Spraying water, ink, and colors on a large sheet of tracing paper and allowing them to mix spontaneously, he then laid another sheet on the top. When the two sheets adhered, the elements in between seemed to transform into rippling water. The artist then separated the two sheets, cropping and editing to make this fantastical and ethereal image.

© The Liu Kuo-sung Archives, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva

Rough cement-cast orbs are suspended over narrow slabs of fragile glass fitted over a wood podium. The spheres are arranged from small to large along the semicircular track. Due to the interplay of light and shadow, and our shifting gaze as we move around the work, it exudes dynamism and movement. Like beads rebounding when dropped on the floor, or atoms shooting away from a single line, Convergence ultimately captures movement in space.

© Sunagawa Haruhiko, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva

In the 1990s, Li Huasheng took multiple trips to Buddhist monasteries in the Himalayas, and found inspiration in lines of chanting monks that he saw there. Like this chanting, the construction of Li’s grid paintings involved a deeply meditative process: each line required patience and a clear mind, repeated until the whole painting was filled. These grids represent a record of Li’s life; his experience of painting each grid—sometimes a months-long process—is embodied in his lines.

© Li Huasheng Art Foundation, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva

Matti Kujasalo creates intricate multicolored patterns using thin strips of tape, sometimes as small as one-tenth of a millimeter in diameter. With each new layer of tape, he paints a new color, always finishing his paintings with black and peeling back the tape layers to reveal a grid of rainbow hues. A Constructivist painter, Kujasalo’s work displays the artist’s strong interest in color-field painting and mechanical, serial painting techniques.

© Matti Kujasalo, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva

© Irma Blank, photos by Michael Brezinski, courtesy of the artist and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

In these two works, artist Irma Blank explores the relationship between breath and text. As if inviting us to read it, Dal Libro Totale is bound like a book. Instead of words and letters, though, we find repetitive drawn-out strokes, rhythmically punctuated by blank spaces. This illegibility repeats in Abecedarium with ultramarine blue bands that grow darker at the center, mimicking the spine of a book. So how can you read these? Simple. Breathe in…

© Irma Blank, photos by Michael Brezinski, courtesy of the artist and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

A representative work in Chua Ek Kay’s series of lotus ponds, the flowers are reduced to the broken branches and dried leaves of late autumn. The artist explored the spiritual essence in a minimal style with flattened compositions, purely abstract forms, and expressive lines. As if some gibberish recorded in illegible calligraphy, it is executed with agitated and forceful brushwork. With only essence remaining, this painting conceptually illuminates the vitality of the lotuses.

© Estate of Chua Ek Kay, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva

Bingyi leaves the scale of this painting intentionally ambiguous: Let Me Become might be showing us microscopic cells, blossoming flowers, or the entirety of the ever-expanding universe. This piece is a part of Bingyi’s series of paintings related to the notion of wanwu (roughly translated as “myriad things”). She considers this artwork an object of meditation, connecting different viewers through a shared experience and creating a space for deep contemplation.

© Bingyi, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva

Max Cole’s artworks engulf the viewer in the infinite possibilities of the mind. Her practice is underscored by a sense of harmony and serenity produced through repetitive, freehand mark-making reminiscent of a hypnotic, spiritual chant. She spends hours diligently drawing precise lines, allowing her compositions time to unfold through her motions. Cole’s works can be seen as allusions to her childhood, recalling her time spent in the flat, expansive plains of the Southwest.

© Max Cole, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva

While the images presented in many of Ophélie Asch’s paintings are structurally and visually ambiguous, Bataille aux craters is one of a series of works that have been compared to images of ruins—they often appear to depict structures that are either shattered or crushed, or are reminiscent of fossils. Asch creates a vision of a dreamlike world infused with things like interwoven branches and twigs, subterranean mycorrhizal networks, and frantic swarms of insects. It is not so much an image of the visible world as an image of the energies within and underlying the visible world.

© Ophélie Asch, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva

Shirazeh Houshiary’s artworks are often produced by the diligent layering of pencil lines paired with acrylic or Aquacryl pigment. In Torn, serrated lines emanate in a spiral, forming a translucent veil. The veil, or membrane, is a recurring motif in her practice and can be seen as a metaphor for the barrier that shields us from our awareness of our own existence. Transcending above the influence of any one religion, Houshiary’s artworks exude an unmistakably spiritual quality

© Shirazeh Houshiary, photo by Ellen Page Wilson, courtesy of the artist

Kitamura Junko is a pioneering ceramist whose conceptually daring works extend the medium far beyond traditional rules of functionality. These signature works by the artist, stonewares decorated with painstakingly intricate lacelike patterns, exemplify her production methods. The minuscule concentric dots and geometric indentations suggest snowflakes, celestial constellations, or Japanese textile patterns. Kitamura instills her patterning with what she describes as “both quiet and powerful movement, some [designs] slow and delicate and others fast and bold.”

© Kitamura Junko, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva

The slow and deliberate mark-making process constitutes a record of the artist’s bodily movements. Short, hooked marks with blurred edges are applied methodically to plain paper. Their slight variation within the grid is rhythmic, almost musical. By using minimal gestures to occupy and transform space, Lee applies the concept of blank-leaving (liu bai), a Chinese aesthetic principle where areas are intentionally left untouched, adapting it into his own visual language of minimalism.

© Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva

Created nearly four decades into the development of Park’s Seo-Bo’s Ecriture series, this piece acts as a record of the artist’s repeated action, creating shallow furrows in wet hanji paper, an act of meditative self-emptying. In the center of the work Park embeds a “breathing hole,” a break from his signature furrows that allows the eye and the spirit a place of rest and emptiness.

© Park Seo-Bo, photos courtesy of the artist and Kukje Gallery, Seoul

Zhang Yu’s signature fingerprint paintings are at once self-portraits, rubbings, and meditations. The artist repeatedly presses his finger print into his paper, commonly using red or black ink, but in this case, only water. Employing his fingerprint as a stamp, Zhang creates a textured surface in his water-only pieces, the trace of the action here conveyed through the indentation of the paper, as opposed to the stamped ink.

© Zhang Yu, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva

Huang Zhiyang began his Possessing Numerous Peaks series after moving to Beijing in 2006, inspired by the towering mountains that surround the city. He sees these mountains as dragons, the undulating grooves in the sculptures embodying the flow of their qi, or energy, running through and around their bodies. Huang’s interest in the flow of qi is also central to the artist’s ink painting practice.

© Huang Zhiyang, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva

This work features two large masses—one a shadow of the other. The dark form in the foreground is made up of repeated dabs of ink, growing drier at the center. Behind it, a light form is rendered in a similar manner, though in reverse. This time, wet brushstrokes begin at the center and grow drier moving outwards. The painting, with its dark and light forms, echoing one another, suggests the Daoist concept of yin and yang.

© Yan Binghui, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva

Fung Ming Chip is a reformer of calligraphy, morphing a millennia-old tradition into a practice that reflects contemporary life. He has created more than one hundred calligraphic scripts throughout his career. For Needle Script, the artist blurs the divide between the interior and exterior spaces of his characters by punctuating lightly-painted lines with rich black strokes, slashed across his paper. Fung stamps two of his own hand-carved seals on Accidentally Passing, seen in the upper right and lower left corners. The calligraphy reads:

Accidentally Passing

Strong or weak spirit
Follow the whirling engine
Steadily crossing the equator
Quantity quality and pattern are overpowered
Fooling the physical structure
Confusing time and focusing distance Inverting moon and star
Freezing ideology
Existing will
Exceeding body’s limit 36,000 feet up
Looking down at living earth
Searching for unknown future
Looking over to sky
Shrinking eternity
Thinking ahead
Why is there no darkness

© Fung Ming Chip, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva

The secret to understanding Qiu Shihua’s artwork lies in the time one spends with it. Almost impossible to perceive at first glance, Qiu’s nearly-white landscapes are actually painted in shades of red, blue, and yellow. Essential to the artist’s work is qiyun, or spirit resonance: as opposed to conveying a formal likeness, he aims to convey the spirit of his subject, so that it may resonate with future viewers.

© Qiu Shihua, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva

Wang Tiande’s signature technique came out of a chance happening when, in 2002, the artist’s cigarette fell onto his paper. In his works today, he intentionally sears his paper using lit sticks of incense in place of a brush, layering burned landscapes and calligraphy atop paintings in ink and brush, allowing for glimpses of ink to peak through the negative space of his burnt strokes.

© Wang Tiande, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva

This painting depicts a landscape among misty clouds, where the flow of qi (energy) is carefully rendered. Superimposed on natural scenery are fragmented forms, geometric doodles, and discursive lines that evoke urban architecture, digital signals, or the formation of Heaven and Earth. The broken lines are similar to the ox-hair texture strokes (niumao cun), yet the reference is overwhelmed by Leung Kui-ting’s modern twist, where he harmonizes traditional Chinese landscape paintings with modern spatial aesthetics.

© Leung Kui-ting, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva

This work incorporates a symbol of rope braiding—a traditional folk art—into the landscape. The twisting parallel lines were executed with a special brush that the artist invented by dividing the hair of a wide brush into several subgroups, thus generating several thin lines of paint. The upper mountains were painted on crumpled paper. By manipulating the line, form, and space, this fantastic and majestic dreamscape emerged from the artist’s unique style and technique.

© Estate of Chu Ko, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva

Late Rabbit has all the elements of a traditional Chinese painting—inscribed colophon, brocade mounting, mountainous landscape—but is created not with brush and silk, but pen on paper. The pattern of Joey Leung Ka-yin’s silk brocade is entirely hand-drawn; her inscription emulates a computer typeface. It reads:

Please forgive me your majesty
You know I am never late
I mistakenly took the wrong path
And was distracted by the flirtatious glances
like a group of jumping fleas
They threw me the sweetest “hello” I have ever heard
I fell headlong into their embrace
Then I lost my way and I didn’t know how to find it
That’s the reason why I am late

© 2021 Joey Leung Ka-yin, photo courtesy of the artist

Reminiscent of traditional Chinese paintings in composition, this work in Yao Jui-Chung’s “fake landscapes” series intentionally usurps the so-called orthodoxy. An isolated hut among mountains and mists traditionally indicates a lofty scholar’s reclusion—a literati pursuit. This painting, however, features a surprising secret lover. Painted with pens instead of brushes, decorated with flamboyant colors and gold leaves, this painting expresses an unavoidable influence of China’s traditions and the artist’s rebellion against it.

© Yao Jui-Chung, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva

In 1987, Xu Bing completed his master of fine arts degree in printmaking, and presented the woodblock print piece Five Series of Repetition as his thesis project. The series showed the evolution of carved wood blocks over time, starting with prints of uncut woodblocks, and finishing with prints where nearly all of the wood had been carved away. In this printing, we see a midway point in the series, in which the carved scenes of farmland are fully etched, their forms not yet chipped away.

© Xu Bing Studio, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva

Horse and Rose is recorded in Chen’s dream journal as follows:

Dream: July 17, 2005
I am alone and running as fast as I can. I almost crash into a car. On the dirt road ahead I see a horse-drawn cart. The cart is loaded up with flower pots. There are tropical plants with thorns and there are the usual roses. I can’t bring them back, so I don’t need to ask the price. I see that on the horse’s head is a big bouquet of roses. I don’t know if the flowers are to feed the horse or for decoration.

I have to meet my son; he is waiting for me at home. As I walk onward, I reach the entrance of a northern village where there is a great multitude of people gathered for market. People are selling things like tofu dregs, bottle caps, and dirty, wet towels. I don’t dare buy a flat-bread to eat there.

I get into a taxi and haven’t seen whether the driver is male or female. He drives and suddenly stops inside a room. There is a little pathway by a storefront. The people in the store are making cotton-padded pajama pants and tops. I take several pairs but they are all massive. Some are patterned with blue stripes, others with purple. I think to myself that I should make a pair to wear in the winter, but I am also afraid that the cloth is not clean.

The taxi driver parked here isn’t looking for fares, so why is it sitting here? His car can’t get out from here. He needs to back up, turn around and drive straight ahead. Am I worried that the car will hit me or that I will run into it first? He starts up the car and drives into the elevator. The buttons on that rickety old elevator are worn down and unclear, you can’t make out which is up and down. In the middle of driving in the driver discovers that this isn’t an elevator that cars can drive into. From the floor of the elevator there’s a part where you can see the laborers below at work. The car drives forward and falls into the pit below. So dangerous! As usual, the workers are breaking a sweat. The taxi driver has me show the way. The car can’t find the main gate from which to exit. I use my son’s mobile phone to call him. But the numbers are wrong. My son is at home waiting for me. This female taxi driver tells me she will only charge me 15 RMB. I tell her it’s OK.

Translated by Maya Kóvskaya

© Chen Haiyan, photo courtesy of the artist

Chen Haiyan brings her dreams to life in bold, expressionistic woodblock prints and paintings, rich with ink. Her signature process began with small etchings on wood, based on entries from her dream diaries, which she has been writing in since 1981, but have since grown to large-scale woodcuts carved into hard pearwood panels. The events of her dreams often mimic her daily life, and are filled with whimsy, anxiety, and, at times, anger.

© Chen Haiyan, photo courtesy of the artist

In his photographic works, Beijing-based artist Michael Cherney embraces Chinese ink painting aesthetics, drawing upon traditional subjects, formats, and style. Captured here five summits from the mountainous area of Zhangjiajie in Hunan Province, China. The use of traditional paper as a ground and the scroll mounting format reinforce the work’s painterly quality. The grain of the photograph, too, takes the place of evident brushwork, both signs of an artist’s hand.

© Michael Cherney, photos courtesy of the artist

© Xu Bing Studio, photo by Fang Chao

Based on Lui Shou-Kwan’s Wood Houses in the Mountains, Background Story is one in a series of works by Xu Bing that recreates modern and historical ink landscape paintings in light-box installations. Though Background Story appears as a peaceful, idyllic landscape from the front, a look behind the piece reveals that it is composed of trash and natural debris, contrasting the historical landscape with allusions to the contemporary polluted environment.

© Helen Ting, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva

Ravines, mountains, and trees creep up Huang Yan’s torso, then cascade over arms down to the fingertips. In literati ink painting, the human figure is often secondary to the landscape. Here, however, it looms large. As body becomes canvas, the title, Chinese Shanshui Tattoo, suddenly rings truer. While the paint has already begun to fleck off, it is more than skin-deep. The tradition of ink painting is indelibly impressed upon the artist’s heart.

© Huang Yan, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva

The monumental landscapes of the Northern Song dynasty inspired Li Huayi to forge a unique personal style. Forgoing the panoramic landscape of the Northern Song, however, Li deconstructs the elements and recombines them into an abstract scene in which details are amplified. The geometric mountain-like forms are magnificent and dynamic. The crystalline details of the boulders suggest a microcosm, while the dark, deep creases in the upper center draw the viewer into a mysterious macro-realm.

© Li Huayi, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva