In the 1990s, Li Huasheng took multiple trips to Buddhist monasteries in the Himalayas, and found inspiration in lines of chanting monks that he saw there. Like this chanting, the construction of Li’s grid paintings involved a deeply meditative process: each line required patience and a clear mind, repeated until the whole painting was filled. These grids represent a record of Li’s life; his experience of painting each grid—sometimes a months-long process—is embodied in his lines.
Rough cement-cast orbs are suspended over narrow slabs of fragile glass fitted over a wood podium. The spheres are arranged from small to large along the semicircular track. Due to the interplay of light and shadow, and our shifting gaze as we move around the work, it exudes dynamism and movement. Like beads rebounding when dropped on the floor, or atoms shooting away from a single line, Convergence ultimately captures movement in space.
© Sunagawa Haruhiko, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva
This oil painting was based on a photograph in the 1920s or ’30s. Capturing a mundane moment, the scene shows rickshaws from behind as they move up the street. Shop banners blow in the wind, the characters on them barely legible. Mimicking the out-of-focus effect of an old black-and-white photograph, the painting evokes a sense of nostalgia. The blurriness contributes to the sensation of an ephemeral moment eluding the viewer like a faded memory.
© Chen Bolan, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva
Matti Kujasalo creates intricate multicolored patterns using thin strips of tape, sometimes as small as one-tenth of a millimeter in diameter. With each new layer of tape, he paints a new color, always finishing his paintings with black and peeling back the tape layers to reveal a grid of rainbow hues. A Constructivist painter, Kujasalo’s work displays the artist’s strong interest in color-field painting and mechanical, serial painting techniques.
© Matti Kujasalo, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva
In this piece, the sun has already set on the glum scene. As our eyes adjust to the darkness, a construction site comes into view. A herd of sheep meanders among bare pillars of poured concrete, appearing out of place and lost. Here, Wang Gongxin bears witness to the rapid transformation of his hometown, Beijing, following the late ’80s and early ’90s reforms. Wang blurs boundaries between old and new, urban and rural, reality and memory.
© Wang Gongxin, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva
In this diptych, natural forces and the passage of time become active participants in the creative process. On the left, the characters “mountains and waters” or simply, “landscape” (shanshui) can be clearly read. On the right, they are almost entirely erased by the forces at work. Landscape painting in water and ink takes concrete form as three manifestations of water: landscape (“mountains, water” or shanshui), ink (“ink water” or moshui), and ice (“ice water” or bingshui), together spelling the title of the piece.
Hiroshi Sugimoto is one of the most gifted photographers active today. In creating this series, Sugimoto referenced early experiments with electricity by such pioneers as Benjamin Franklin and William Fox Talbot. In 2009 the artist set up in his darkroom a 400,000-volt Van De Graaff generator which sent bolts of electricity through film onto a metal table while he manipulated the sparking bolts with metal kitchen utensils. The resulting images often resemble vascular systems and highly-energy cosmic events.
Born out of a collaboration with the Singapore Tyler Print Institute, Lin Tianmiao’s Seeing Shadows series (2005–12) combines large-scale photographic prints with her signature material of white thread. Known for her thread-bound sculptures, Seeing Shadows presents a rare foray into two-dimensional wall-hanging artwork for Lin.
© Lin Tianmiao, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva
In his Divine Light series, Zhang Yu sought to erase any trace of his own identity, consciously painting in a way that disguised his brush strokes and choosing a subject disconnected from his own lived experience: a mysterious primeval light. He sees these works as an experimental combination of ink art and Western techniques, which he used to explore the boundaries of ink painting.
© Zhang Yu, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva