A Return to the Primal: Contemporary Ink, Happening Anew

The primal at the beginning is untamed vitality. The refinement in between is the formation of experience, technique, and order. The primal that comes later is freedom regained after passing through order.

Many things grow through a cycle like this. Life begins with impulses of its own; later, people establish rules, methods, and standards, turning chaos into order. As we go deeper, what is truly powerful often draws close to nature once again. This naturalness carries the clarity that follows experience, and the ease that comes with understanding.

This is true of aesthetics, and of artistic language too. Sometimes, what is most moving about contemporary art is not its creation of more complex forms, but its reopening of an already mature language, allowing it once again to encounter materials, the body, time, and the act of looking. Over its long history, ink painting has developed layer upon layer of order through brush and ink, vital resonance, composition, unpainted space, the interplay of the insubstantial and the substantial, and the qualities of paper. It has depth, and it has maturity.

What draws me most is the moment when water and ink come into being anew.

It is ancient, with a tradition of its own, yet it still retains a life that has never been fully tamed. With a different material, it can breathe again.

Coated cardstock gives water and ink a different surface. When ink lands, it pauses, slides away, gathers, and swirls. The paper’s surface offers resistance; water wanders across it, and ink leaves boundaries. Water and ink are gently nudged away from their familiar spreading and absorption, encountering the material anew. The image begins to come alive through this collision.

The ground comes first. Water and ink have impulses of their own; the cardstock offers resistance, and the ink pauses, swirls, and gathers on its surface. The traces carry that first breath of vitality. This is where the work begins.

The ground carries that first breath of vitality, the state of water and ink before they have been fully ordered. Lines enter afterward, lifting that energy and giving direction to the feelings left by the material. The image begins to hold its own, while the primal energy remains.

In some images, the first thing to appear is an upward force. It slowly emerges from the edges of the ink, the transitions of gray and white, and the direction of fine, closely drawn lines. That force carries the life of water and ink at the moment of their coming into being, as well as the traces left by the material itself.

I care about this balance. Water and ink have already come into being; judgment enters afterward. Lines give the image its bones, while the material preserves its first breath of vitality. The beauty that moves me most is often found here: not overly embellished, still retaining the vitality of the moment it came into being.

Black has weight in my paintings. It holds emotion, and it holds light. Gray and white emerge from black, like breath, like mist, or like a space the image has opened within itself. Black gives the image depth, and light slowly reveals itself from those depths.

This is what I understand by the primal that comes later. It has the judgment born of experience, and the ease that remains after judgment. The image holds its own, and the material’s earliest life is still there.

What draws me to contemporary ink is that it can still continue to come into being. Tradition gives it depth, materials give it new resistance, and looking gives it new time. Water, ink, the paper’s surface, lines, and light rearrange their relationships with every encounter.

For me, the setting of ART Nanjing was also a chance for looking to happen anew. Placed before viewers, the works brought water, ink, materials, lines, and light into different experiences. The image no longer remained solely within my act of creation; it continued to grow through being seen.

Perhaps this is where the primal that comes later resides: having passed through order, there is still freedom; having passed through judgment, there is still ease. The image holds its own, and the material’s earliest life is still there.