Into the Image: Chapter I Chen Wenji, Shen Chen, Wu Shan, Chen Ruo Bing, Fu Xiaotong

Artist: Chen Wenji, Shen Chen, Wu Shan, Chen Ruo Bing, Fu Xiaotong 

Address: No.101, South Square, One Shenzhen Bay, Shenzhen, China 518054

Ginkgo Space (One Shenzhen Bay) is pleased to present the group exhibition Into the Image: Chapter I, opening on 26 June, as the inaugural exhibition of the gallery’s new space at One Shenzhen Bay. It will also continue as an exhibition series, presenting the diverse practices of artists.

In traditional Eastern aesthetics, the notion of xiang (image) is not a representation of the external world, but a generative state that exists between form and meaning. As stated in the Book of Changes: “The Sages made images to exhaust the ideas.” Here, xiang is both a process of distillation and transformation of the visible world and a manifestation of inner perception and spiritual experience. It is neither a concrete form nor an abstract concept, but a perceptual order that emerges through seeing, sensing, and understanding.

The exhibition brings together works by Chen Wenji, Shen Chen, Wu Shan, Chen Ruo Bing, and Fu Xiaotong. Color, brushwork, structure, and material constitute the essential languages of their practices. Through these artistic vocabularies, the artists open visual experience toward a more expansive field of perception, exploring the flow of time, the formation of space, and the very process of seeing itself.

Chen Wenji (b. 1954, Shanghai) graduated from the Printmaking Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1978 and currently lives and works in Beijing. Working primarily in oil painting, he employs a highly restrained palette and a reduced formal language to construct an abstract, minimalist, and metaphysical visual order. His works convey a quiet, rational, and subtly detached atmosphere.

Shen Chen (b. 1955, Shanghai) currently lives and works in New York and Shanghai. After graduating from the Shanghai Theatre Academy in 1982, he moved to Beijing. In 1988, he received a fellowship to attend the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and later joined the New York Studio School. The following year, he continued his studies at Boston University, and has been based in New York since 1991. As one of the pioneers of Chinese abstract painting and experimental ink art in the 1980s, Shen Chen has, over a career spanning more than five decades, explored the relationships between material, form, and space through abstraction, pursuing a practice rooted in ink traditions yet extending beyond the conventional definition of ink art.

Wu Shan (b. 1960, Hangzhou) graduated from the Oil Painting Department of Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now China Academy of Art) in 1982 and received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1986. He returned to China in 2006 to teach at the China Academy of Art and currently lives and works in Hangzhou. Internalizing the language of Western art and reinterpreting it through the cosmology of Chinese ink painting, Wu Shan creates an abstract visual language in which line and lacquer surface interact, developing a distinctly Eastern abstract practice through the medium of lacquer.

Chen Ruo Bing (b. 1970, Hangzhou) currently lives and works in Düsseldorf. He studied Chinese Painting at Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now China Academy of Art) from 1988 to 1991, and later graduated from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1998. Chen Ruo Bing’s signature practice centers on the relationships between light, color, and spatial fields. He explores the formal potential of geometric shapes, employing them according to different perceptual and psychological responses, allowing them to resonate with and respond to one another.

Fu Xiaotong (b. 1976, Shanxi) received her BFA in Oil Painting from Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts in 2000 and her MFA in Experimental Art from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2013. She currently lives and works in Berlin and Beijing. In recent years, her practice has encompassed xuan paper, installation, sculpture, and performance. Working on layered handmade xuan paper, she employs the traditionally feminine gesture of needle-piercing to gradually reveal images that evoke both the vastness of mountain landscapes and the microscopic forms of life.