Brooklyn Museum's new Asian Wing

The Brooklyn Museum recently re-opened their Arts of China wing. To celebrate, they hosted a marvelous panel with three of the artists featured in Chinese Traditions Now: Bingyi, Zheng Chongbin, and Sun Xun, moderated by Susan L. Beningson, Assistant Curator of Asian Art, and Jane DeBevoise, Chair of the Board of Directors at the Asian Art Archive. Panel Link with Sun Xun's accordion boom unfolded like a scroll.What a great conversation! Each artist presented past and current projects, before the curators dove in with questions about what's on view now. Each had a distinct approach to ink fusing past and present concerns. After the panel, attendees could roam the galleries. Below are some, by no means all, images from that experience.
To view the Museum holdings in their entirety, visit Asian Wing Collection Link. 

Yang Jiechang, 100 Layers of Ink, 1994. I saw a work in Shanghai in this mode, and this is even better: ink, applied 100 layers until the paper cannot hold anymore. The result is profound abstraction borne of ink painting tradition, at once topographical and sticky with history, just like ink itself.

Zheng Chongbin's masterful abstraction, incorporating the various color notes of ink and its inherent dualities.

Detail of below image. If you can identify the artist, please let me know.

Please help-I cannot find the name of this artist. But  the ink load, the delicacy with which this scholars rock is depicted,  proves to be a lifetime achievement.

Qiu Deshu's Natural Order, 1991, an early work, before he began tearing rice paper. Painter Ross Lewis connected the Museum to this early work, and Raggedy Ann Foot readers will recall their duo exhibition in Shanghai on the blog in May 2014. This work shows everything ink can do and be: fluid and deep, light and dark, saturated and dilute, wet and dry. 

Detail, Qiu Deshu

One detail of Bingyi's enormous scroll Cloud Atlas. Bingyi Link
In 2015, I visited Bingyi in her historic Second Ring home, a former temple, in Beijing, with a small group of students. While we were there, Bingyi unrolled a long scroll similar to this one, which we then rolled up together. Her work has taken ink to impressive lengths--literally covering fields and mountains with ink. It has changed the way I see and think about ink.  

Zhang Hongtu, whose Queens Museum retrospective in 2015 revealed an extensive body of work based in humorous cultural observation Museum Link, exhibits his MacDonalds work in bronze. Zhang Hongtu