[Artist Statement] Essay
Graduating from university signified a certain kind of release: no more assignments to submit, no more concern over how instructors might respond to one’s work. The aspirations of my student years passed like images in a peep show, carrying with them a latent ambition. Unlike many of my peers at the time, I believed that innovation required a departure from the two traditions in which we had long been educated: Western realist representation and the formal conventions of Chinese painting and calligraphy. At the same time, one could still draw upon the materiality of Chinese ink while taking inspiration from Western abstract form. This required an open, cross-cultural mindset and marked the beginning of my engagement with modernist artistic practice.
At the time, abstract painting was regarded as “avant-garde.” Its avant-garde character lay precisely in its opposition to both mainstream realist painting and traditional landscape painting, as well as in its emphasis on artistic form itself, distanced from political and social concerns. For this reason, it remained at the margins of what might be called “contemporary history.” Forty years later, abstraction has become an integral component of contemporary art, and we are now able to recognize the significance of those early, pioneering efforts.
My abstraction began with experimental ink painting—an abstract form of ink practice in which the structural elements of calligraphy are dismantled and recomposed into pictorial fields defined by brush quality and blank space. The writing is no longer language; it is writing without forming characters. I sought to attain the expansive, gestural tension found in the work of Franz Kline, while also approaching the ambiguous, ethereal sense of emptiness created through extensive blank space in the work of Bada Shanren. Such “expressive” brushstrokes and their compositional structures introduce greater tonal variation in ink, imbuing the work with a flowing, quasi-Zen vitality.
In contrast to Bada Shanren, my brushwork does not rely on imagery; and unlike Kline, my gestures are not purely compositional. What I refer to as brushstroke, gesture, or brush quality has become the defining stylistic signifier of my work. Over more than four decades of practice, the brushstroke—or what might be termed brush quality—has remained the sole constitutive element, or the primary mode of representation, in my painting. From the early ink works characterized by highly expressive, calligraphic, and multidirectional strokes, my language gradually evolved toward a reduction and attenuation into a single, vertically oriented stroke.
As Guo Ruoxu of the Northern Song dynasty once wrote: “This is called the imprint of the mind; it originates in the mind, takes shape in traces, and the traces accord with the mind.” Literati painting in China constitutes one historical trajectory, while Western Minimalism constitutes another; both have reached their respective culminations. Viewed across the histories of Eastern and Western art, the possibility for contemporary artists to create something entirely new appears exceedingly limited, almost nonexistent. Yet at the point of intersection between these two histories, there remain unresolved gaps.
The successful assimilation of Eastern cultural elements within Western abstraction and Minimalism, in turn, affirms our own strategic orientation. Within literati painting—its poetic evocation of landscape and its conception of the unity between humanity and nature—there exists an implicit tendency toward abstraction. Similarly, the extensive use of blank space in the work of Bada Shanren contains abstract elements, yet never fully arrives at abstraction in the strict sense. Our early engagement with abstract ink painting may thus be understood as driven by a sense of insufficiency; we were not entirely confident and needed to draw upon insights from other artistic and cultural systems. This, precisely, is the task of the contemporary artist.
Minimalism does not pursue “emptiness” per se. Rather, Minimalist artists drew upon Eastern culture and philosophy, allowing material to exist in its most reduced artistic form, and elevating this mode of existence to a cultural and philosophical level. In this sense, the artistic language we practice today—still difficult to name—shares certain affinities with Minimalism, while also occupying an unknown historical threshold. Contemporary art is in a continual process of development and transformation; it is not the cultural phenomenon of a single nation or region, but an international formation shaped through global interchange.
My own practice has benefited from a migratory mode of living, moving back and forth between Shanghai and New York City, as well as from travels across different parts of the world. The interplay and mutual supplementation of diverse geographical and cultural contexts have continuously propelled and reshaped the development of my work.
Shen Chen
March 7, 2026
