Works on Paper

Goedhuis Contemporary is pleased to present Works on Paper, a richly diverse selection of drawings and ink paintings by twelve contemporary Chinese artists. Draughtsmanship is considered an essential skill in China's art academies, and as a result, artists who primarily work in photography, performance, oil painting, or sculpture, often also produce works on paper of the highest technical skill.

The painting and drawings on view represent a wide spectrum of variations on the ink on paper tradition. They range from a classical modernist aesthetic, as embodied by the energetic ink paintings of Zeng Shanqing, to the whimsy and humor of the literati tradition adapted by Li Jin, and the surreal expressionist ink paintings of Li Xiaoxuan.

Four of the artists included in the exhibition graduated from Hangzhou's elite Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, which has a long tradition of producing some of China's most innovative and established artists. Huang Yong Ping paints part-diagrammatic, part-conceptual works to accompany his iconic installations. Shi Qi renders her powerfully introspective portraits in a controlled, yet fluid hand, Song Yonghong is known for the emotional intensity of his Bath of Consolation series, and Wang Jinsong, long recognized as a master of the Cynical Realist style, has recently returned to ink painting with a body of vigorous and enigmatic works.

Ma Liuming's Baby series drawings represent a meeting of his seminal performance work and his more recent figurative painting, and American-trained Su-en Wong is widely celebrated for her exciting and elusive tableaux that feature her own image multiplied and interacting with itself. Yu Hong, one of China's most highly regarded figure painters, presents intimate and tactile pastel works of family photographs in her Witness to Growth series, while Zhao Gang shrewdly and irreverently reinterprets cultural imagery from China wrenched from its original context.

Though the subject matter, style, and impact of the works presented in the current exhibition are greatly varied, they share an unaffected, hand-wrought beauty and a reverence for the expressive possibilities of the drawn line.