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
Shirazeh Houshiary’s artworks are often produced by the diligent layering of pencil lines paired with acrylic or Aquacryl pigment. In Torn, serrated lines emanate in a spiral, forming a translucent veil. The veil, or membrane, is a recurring motif in her practice and can be seen as a metaphor for the barrier that shields us from our awareness of our own existence. Transcending above the influence of any one religion, Houshiary’s artworks exude an unmistakably spiritual quality
Max Cole’s artworks engulf the viewer in the infinite possibilities of the mind. Her practice is underscored by a sense of harmony and serenity produced through repetitive, freehand mark-making reminiscent of a hypnotic, spiritual chant. She spends hours diligently drawing precise lines, allowing her compositions time to unfold through her motions. Cole’s works can be seen as allusions to her childhood, recalling her time spent in the flat, expansive plains of the Southwest.
© Max Cole, photo: Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva
While the images presented in many of Ophélie Asch's paintings are structurally and visually ambiguous, Bataille aux craters is one of a series of works that have been compared to images of ruins—they often appear to depict structures that are either shattered or crushed, or are reminiscent of fossils. Asch creates a vision of a dreamlike world infused with things like interwoven branches and twigs, subterranean mycorrhizal networks, and frantic swarms of insects.
The slow and deliberate mark-making process constitutes a record of the artist’s bodily movements. Short, hooked marks with blurred edges are applied methodically to plain paper. Their slight variation within the grid is rhythmic, almost musical. By using minimal gestures to occupy and transform space, Lee applies the concept of blank-leaving (liu bai), a Chinese aesthetic principle where areas are intentionally left untouched, adapting it into his own visual language of minimalism.
A representative work in Chua Ek Kay’s series of lotus ponds, the flowers are reduced to the broken branches and dried leaves of late autumn. The artist explored the spiritual essence in a minimal style with flattened compositions, purely abstract forms, and expressive lines. As if some gibberish recorded in illegible calligraphy, it is executed with agitated and forceful brushwork. With only essence remaining, this painting conceptually illuminates the vitality of the lotuses.
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.