Beijing-based artist Hao Liang extends the conventions of Chinese ink and wash painting by revisiting legacies of Chinese history and art traditions. He is regarded as a leading figure of New Ink (新水墨, xinshuimo), a painting style prevalent in the early 2010s, which merges traditional Chinese ink painting motifs with modern techniques.
Read MoreBorn in Chengdu, Hao Liang was exposed to art and literature from an early age. He studied in the Chinese painting department at Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing, graduating with a BFA in 2006. His graduation work, a four-panel ink painting titled Skimming (2006), was awarded First Prize. Hao Liang returned to the Sichuan Institute for his postgraduate studies, earning his MFA in 2009. In the same year, he received the prestigious Luo Zhongli Scholarship as the first recipient dedicated to traditional Chinese painting.
Hao Liang held his first solo exhibition at My Humble House, Taipei in 2011. Titled Nest Image, the show featured paintings filled with grotesque figures, diversified motifs and intricate details, incongruous with the academic system of contemporary ink painting that was restrained by conventional themes and techniques.
In 2017, Hao Liang received significant international attention as one of the youngest participating artists at the 57th Venice Biennale.
Hao Liang has worked prolifically in ink and colour on silk, a traditional genre of Chinese painting embedded in the country's visual history. In his large-scale silk scroll painting, The Tale of Clouds (2012—2013), the artist combines themes from ancient Chinese mysteries, Western mythology, and Taoist philosophy with modern anatomy. The classical linear narrative is replaced with one that fuses different eras and spaces where humanity, materiality, and divinity are attuned.
For Aura — Collotype Facsimile of the True View (2015—2016), Hao Liang used the medium of collotype printing to draw parallels between the concept of 'aura' as articulated by Walter Benjamin, and the Taoist idea of qi'xi (breath or air). The artist sought to extricate the aura/qi'xi of artefacts from museums and private collections, including the Bonnefanten collection, from their historical contexts.
Hao Liang engages in fieldwork, collecting, and archival research to inform the development of his works. For The Virtuous Being (2015), the artist reimagines the history of literati gardens, referencing Wang Wei's Wangchuan Villa and the historic Yanshan Garden. The garden, which was the former home of Ming dynasty scholar Wang Shizhen, was destroyed in the 20th-century and rebuilt as a multifunctional area including high-class residential buildings and a municipal park, complete with a Ferris wheel.
Hao Liang visited Suzhou to map the scholar-literati circle around Wang, the history of the garden, and its transformation over time. The resulting archive collection was presented alongside a scroll painting measuring over 13 metres long, that reconfigures the classical garden and conjures long-lost sentiments of Chinese literati painting. The scroll unfolds with a panoramic narrative, beginning with the relics of an idyllic landscape. From right to left, the landscape shifts to a farm scene, the Yanshan Garden, and other Suzhou gardens, interspersed throughout with abstracted images of a Ferris wheel.
From 2014 to 2016, Hao Liang produced Eight Views of Xiaoxiang, a series of eight monumental paintings on silk. Scenes of Xiaoxiang, the region in modern-day Hunan province at which the Xiao and Xiang rivers meet, are a recurring motif in Chinese painting since the Song dynasty. With his rendition, Hao Liang observes how Xiaoxiang has lost its geographical anchoring through cultural transmission to represent the broader concept of shanshui (landscape). 'One needs to first move towards new territories and then slowly improve his skill level. Only through rigorous practice can you innovate,' claims the artist in an interview filmed at the UCCA in 2016.
Hao Liang's depiction of Xiaoxiang is non-naturalistic: the sea, the river, and the mountain are rendered at the same level, while large bamboo juts out from the bottom of the composition. Described by the artist as 'Rubik's cubes', the series is filled with contradictory, tangled perspectives, resulting in a distortion of distance and depth. Executed in pale, muted monochromes, the paintings recall the palettes of the referred Song dynasty paintings while considering their relation to the modern day. With each section measuring nearly four metres wides, Eight Views of Xiaoxiang subverts the often intimate experience of viewing traditional Chinese scrolls.
Hao Liang's solo exhibitions include Circular Pond, Aurora Museum, Shanghai (2019); The Virtuous Being, Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou (2016); Eight Views of Xiaoxiang, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2016); and BACA Projects: Aura, Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht (2016).
Select group exhibitions include Viva Arte Viva, 57th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2017); S_treams and Mountains without End: Landscape Traditions of China_, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2017); Collection of Centre Pompidou, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2017); and Bentu: Chinese artists in a time of turbulence and transformation, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2016).
Hao Liang's work is collected by major museums across the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; KADIST, San Francisco; M+, Hong Kong; and Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, among others.
Hao Liang's Instagram can be found here.
Shanyu Zhong | Ocula | 2023
