WANG SHAOQIANG

Wang Shaoqiang’s art experiments and explorations began in the 1990s with the aftermath of the ‘cultural root-seeking’ craze in the Chinese art world. At that time, the development of Chinese contemporary ink art was forced to respond to the demands of identity from cultural nationalism since the May Fourth New Culture Movement: at the same time, it had to face the so-called ‘contemporaneity’ oppression of contemporary art’s universalisation and globalisation, which traps itself into an exceptionally awkward situation. The New Literati Painting, boasted of traditional brush and ink, and the Abstract Ink Painting, eager to enter the contemporary era, can be regarded as two typical cases of artistic trends and creations at that time. Based on his love and confidence in the traditional Chinese culture, Wang Shaoqiang cultivated a unique insight, which helped him move against all the obstacles, hence observing what is good and what is not. With a cultural stance of connecting ancient and modern art between China and the West, the present and the past, drawing inspiration from the spirit of modern Western science, Wang Shaoqiang has conducted a systematic study and reflection on Chinese ink art, especially the literati painting tradition after the Song Dynasty. He has also studied and reflected on the relationship between ink art and geography, geology, anthropology, archaeology and other disciplines. A creative and imaginative reconstruction of tradition has been carried out from the perspectives of contemporary art, including media, physics, and production, which helped him develop a unique set of visual language logic and artistic viewing methods. In Wang Shaoqiang’s exploration, the continuation and upheaval of ink art culture tradition constitute a tense bipolar situation in current reality. The artist’s ‘observation’ of the world is also achieved through the cosmic wandering of ‘looking up (to the universe)’ and ‘looking down (to the fine dust)’, entering history from mythology and falling into the human world from Utopia.