Mutual Becoming: Huang Rui, Yang Jiechang, Wang Tiande, Song Ling, Du Jie, Chen Yufan, Li Shun

Ginkgo Space (Shenzhen Bay) will present the group exhibition Mutual Becoming on August 22, bringing together seven artists: Huang Rui, Yang Jiechang, Wang Tiande, Song Ling, Du Jie, Chen Yufan, and Li Shun.

The exhibition explores an enduring Eastern experience within contemporary art. Rather than attempting to define what constitutes “Easternness”, it approaches the question through the artists’ individual practices, exploring how tradition enters the contemporary, how cultural experience is transformed into personal languages, and how artists reconsider their relationship with history and themselves amid a changing reality.

Shaped by personal experience, geographic displacement, and historical change, the artists’ practices bring the abstract languages of Western modernism and the conceptual consciousness of contemporary painting into dialogue with ink, line, landscape, and the philosophical traditions of Dao and Zen in Chinese art. Through these intersections, Eastern experience takes on new forms of expression across different cultural contexts. These diverse practices ultimately raise a shared question: when tradition is no longer inherited as a fixed visual form, in what ways can it enter the present?

What this exhibition presents is precisely a contemporary Eastern aesthetic that remains in a state of becoming and translation—drifting between tradition and the present, history and reality, personal experience and cultural memory. Here, distinct forms of expression, viewing, and perception converge, allowing the Eastern spirit embedded within contemporary experience to arise naturally and mutually within the space.

Huang Rui, born in 1952 in Beijing. Huang Rui began exhibiting his work in 1979 in connection with the Stars Art Exhibition. He primarily focused on painting throughout the 1980s. From the late 1980s onward, Huang has developed an independent concept of space, embarking on a path of spiritual practice that infuses individual consciousness into the primordial matter of the universe to achieve balance. In the 1990s, he began exploring increasingly experimental and diverse forms, extending his practice into installation, performance, photography, printmaking, and other media.

Yang Jiechang, born in 1956 in Foshan, Guangdong. Yang Jiechang currently lives and works in Heidelberg, Germany, and Paris, France. He studied traditional Chinese painting in his early years. In 1989, Yang participated in the landmark exhibition Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, after which he moved to Europe. His practice combines Chinese tradition with contemporary art. Since the late 1990s, Yang has also engaged in figurative practices. The different stages of his artistic practice reveal the unconventional perspective of a contemporary literati artist.

Wang Tiande, born in 1960 in Shanghai. Wang Tiande is widely regarded as one of the most important artists in the development of contemporary ink painting in China. Since 2002, he has alternated between ink painting, smoke burning, and incense burning on xuan paper, employing multiple layers of overlapping and mounting to create complex compositions rooted in traditional landscape painting. Later, he integrated these landscapes with ancient stele rubbings from his personal collection, echoing the themes of reproduction and destruction conveyed in his incense-burned landscapes.

Song Ling, born in 1961 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang. Song Ling is one of the important artists associated with the ’85 New Wave Art Movement’. He moved to Melbourne, Australia, in 1988 and returned to China in 2013, establishing his studio in Hangzhou. In recent years, Song has devoted his practice entirely to contemporary expressions through ink, gradually developing in two directions: the reconfiguration of traditional Chinese painting and the subtle estrangement of ready-made objects. For Song, what matters is not ink itself, but what ideas and visual narratives can be articulated through the medium of ink.

Du Jie, born in 1968 in Xiangyang, Hubei. Whether on canvas or paper, her works always begin with a single dot that wanders across the surface, with the duration of each creation serving as its title—her life spent quietly poured into this simple yet intricate labor. Du’s practice is not merely a conceptual proposition, but an experience of life. Through the gradual transformation between simplicity and complexity, her works reveal the dialectical relationship between being and non-being, emptiness and form.

Chen Yufan, born in 1973 in Putian, Fujian. Chen Yufan currently lives and works in Shanghai. Drawing inspiration from Dao and Zen, he transforms the philosophical ideas into a distinctive meditative process and personal language through repetitive dots, lines and pure colors. The gathering and dispersal of objects and space constitute his distinctive practice. From the perspective of contemporary art, Chen’s work can be understood as a form of conceptually grounded performance.

Li Shun, born in 1988 in Xuzhou, Jiangsu. Li Shun currently lives and works in Hangzhou. In the early stages of his practice, Li was fascinated by the traces left through time by urban subjects under long-exposure photography. The trailing lines of light led him to draw parallels with the expressive forms of Chinese calligraphy. As his practice developed, he sought to locate a point of convergence between the present and tradition, incorporating traditional Chinese aesthetics into photography as an artistic medium and exploring new possibilities for the contemporary evolution of traditional Chinese art.