Wang Tiande’s signature technique came out of a chance happening when, in 2002, the artist’s cigarette fell onto his paper. In his works today, he intentionally sears his paper using lit sticks of incense in place of a brush, layering burned landscapes and calligraphy atop paintings in ink and brush, allowing for glimpses of ink to peak through the negative space of his burnt strokes.

© Wang Tiande, photo: LACMA

The secret to understanding Qiu Shihua’s artwork lies in the time one spends with it. Almost impossible to perceive at first glance, Qiu’s nearly-white landscapes are actually painted in shades of red, blue, and yellow. Essential to the artist’s work is qiyun, or spirit resonance: as opposed to conveying a formal likeness, he aims to convey the spirit of his subject, so that it may resonate with future viewers.

© Qiu Shihua, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva

Fung Ming Chip is a reformer of calligraphy, morphing a millennia-old tradition into a practice that reflects contemporary life. He has created more than one hundred calligraphic scripts throughout his career. For Needle Script, the artist blurs the divide between the interior and exterior spaces of his characters by punctuating lightly-painted lines with rich black strokes, slashed across his paper. Fung stamps two of his own hand-carved seals on Accidentally Passing, seen in the upper right and lower left corners. The calligraphy reads:

This work features two large masses—one a shadow of the other. The dark form in the foreground is made up of repeated dabs of ink, growing drier at the center. Behind it, a light form is rendered in a similar manner, though in reverse. This time, wet brushstrokes begin at the center and grow drier moving outwards. The painting, with its dark and light forms, echoing one another, suggests the Daoist concept of yin and yang.

© Yan Binghui, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva

Kitamura Junko is a pioneering ceramist whose conceptually daring works extend the medium far beyond traditional rules of functionality. These signature works by the artist, stonewares decorated with painstakingly intricate lacelike patterns, exemplify her production methods. The minuscule concentric dots and geometric indentations suggest snowflakes, celestial constellations, or Japanese textile patterns. Kitamura instills her patterning with what she describes as “both quiet and powerful movement, some [designs] slow and delicate and others fast and bold.”

Zhang Yu’s signature fingerprint paintings are at once self-portraits, rubbings, and meditations. The artist repeatedly presses his finger print into his paper, commonly using red or black ink, but in this case, only water. Employing his fingerprint as a stamp, Zhang creates a textured surface in his water-only pieces, the trace of the action here conveyed through the indentation of the paper, as opposed to the stamped ink.

© Zhang Yu, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva

Created nearly four decades into the development of Park’s Seo-Bo’s Ecriture series, this piece acts as a record of the artist’s repeated action, creating shallow furrows in wet hanji paper, an act of meditative self-emptying. In the center of the work Park embeds a “breathing hole,” a break from his signature furrows that allows the eye and the spirit a place of rest and emptiness.

© Park Seo-Bo, photos courtesy of the artist and Kukje Gallery, Seoul

Huang Zhiyang began his Possessing Numerous Peaks series after moving to Beijing in 2006, inspired by the towering mountains that surround the city. He sees these mountains as dragons, the undulating grooves in the sculptures embodying the flow of their qi, or energy, running through and around their bodies. Huang’s interest in the flow of qi is also central to the artist’s ink painting practice.

© Huang Zhiyang, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva

Bingyi leaves the scale of this painting intentionally ambiguous: Let Me Become might be showing us microscopic cells, blossoming flowers, or the entirety of the ever-expanding universe. This piece is a part of Bingyi’s series of paintings related to the notion of wanwu (roughly translated as “myriad things”). She considers this artwork an object of meditation, connecting different viewers through a shared experience and creating a space for deep contemplation.

© Bingyi, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva