THE Fifth International Ink Painting Biennial of Shenzhen opened with a grand ceremony at the Guan Shanyue Art Museum yesterday. It is scheduled to close Jan. 10, 2007.

This year's event, which is being held on a larger scale than previous editions, includes five exhibitions with different themes: ink painting and design, heritage of brushes and ink, ink, life and taste, metropolis ink painting, and modern Singaporean ink painting.

Altogether, more than 250 artists from over 20 countries and regions are participating in this year's event, displaying off about 400 works of various styles in the city's four art museums, namely the Guan Shanyue Art Museum, Shenzhen Fine Art Institute, He Xiangning Art Museum, and Shenzhen Art Museum.

Ink painting and design

The exhibition at the Guan Shanyue Art Museum showcases more than 60 experimental works by over 40 designers.

"This exhibition offers designers an opportunity of exploring the language of traditional ink painting in their design, allowing them to expose the richness of the expressive power of ink painting," said Dong Xiaoming, one of the exhibition's two organizers.

"Although modern design and traditional ink painting are two different art genres, we tried to combine the two subjects by initiating a new section, called ¡®Designing Ink Painting' in the fourth ink painting biennial in 2004 and inviting 10 internationally acclaimed designers to exhibit their works," Dong said.

"The result was so encouraging that we realized the unique value of this experimental subject and decided to continue in this direction," he said.

Heritage of brushes and ink

The exhibition at the Shenzhen Fine Art Institute includes more than 60 works by seven painters, namely Zhang Lichen, Zhou Kai, Gu Zhenyan, Lin Haizhong, Qiu Ting, Zhu Xinjian, and Lu Fusheng.

The exhibition aims to show the development and current state of traditional Chinese ink painting.

"Wu Changshuo, Huang Binhong, Wu Hufan and Pan Tianshou were among the most active master painters in the modern history of ink painting living in Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, which are considered important strongholds of traditional brushwork," said Yan Shan-chun, who planned the exhibition.

Most of the artists in this exhibition are students of the Chinese master painters named by Yan and are related to the tradition of ink painting in Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces.

Ink, life and taste

The exhibition at the He Xiangning Art Museum has more than 100 works by over 60 artists from China and abroad.

"In the exhibition, the notion of taste becomes a lead-in for artists who are not necessarily familiar with the technique and tradition of ink painting," said the exhibition's planner Martina Koppel-Yang, a German art critic and theorist in the Oriental art.

"The exhibition concept is further developed by considering ink painting a spiritual discipline rather than a technique," she said.

The exhibition comprises works executed using a variety of media, such as photography, video, sculpture and installation.

Metropolis ink painting

The exhibition at the Shenzhen Art Museum displays 126 works by 126 painters from China and overseas.

"We believe ¡®metropolis ink painting' has been accepted as a modern art term, and there are a lot of artists worldwide practicing in this field," said the exhibition's planner Lu Hong.

The exhibits on display were selected from more than 2,000 submissions from China, South Korea, Canada and Germany.

A new concept and a new subject in Chinese painting, the name "metropolis ink painting" was first put forward by the famous Chinese scientist Qian Xuesen in 1993 when he saw paintings on the urban scenery of Shenzhen by artists of the Shenzhen Fine Art Institute, which were published in the People's Daily.

Modern Singaporean ink painting

The exhibition at the Guan Shanyue Art Museum features 37 works from eight Singaporean artists. The oldest among them is Lim Tze-peng, 83, who even today continues to visit Bali regularly to paint. The other seven artists were born in the 1940s or later, and most of them are students of Singapore's first-generation of artists such as See Hiang-to, Fan Chang-tien and Chen Chong-swee, who immigrated from China.

Ink painting as a medium and a painting tradition developed in a confluence of aesthetic ideas and practices in the multi-cultural context of Singapore.

Modern ink paintings in Singapore also portray Southeast Asian themes and subject matters, demonstrating that ink is an international language not limited to a singular culture.

Editor: Wing