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

Earth and Air: IFPDA Print Fair, New York, October 2019

Graphicstudio at IFPDA with a delicious James Rosenquist print from the 1970s--printed on two sheets of paper. I can't stop thinking about this print, which contains exciting, layered landscape space. Fair Link 

Can't remember where I saw this friendly print.

Donald Baechler 2004 - so simple, but the complexity of surface a rich yield close to.

Who? The period feel is enticing.

A large, arresting Leonardo Drew also double-printed.

Leonardo Drew detail: rich, dense, material!

Lothar Osterburg with his mysterious diorama cityscape.

Kiki Smith, a lanscape free from gravity, yet dense and detailed

Detail, Kiki Smith

Sam Francis

Sam Francis

Matisse, free as a bird

Matisse

Note to self: chunky color, incised surfaces, rich, cartoon-like, delicous! - Picasso linocut

Elegant Marina Adams prints, large in internal scale, focusing on edge and transition

Ultramarine shines, a transparent jewel in funky oxide mixtures

Terry Winters, never fails to astound - grids within grids

A simply gorgeous Kiki Smith, what looks like a log seen from above, but equally likely as a planet.

Picasso, Ecce Homo (Apres Rembrandt), 1970 - late in life reviews

Beatriz Milhazes, Flower Swing, 2019, Woodblock, screenprint, gold leaf, 33-3/4 x 37 inches 

A simply exquisite Lari Pittman

And another, attesting to the freedom and experimentation  so necessary in the printmaking process.

Graffiti Sobre Ciment by Antoni Tapies - talk about material - echoing the Leonardo Drew

Detail, Tapies surface

Julian Opie from Luc and Ludivine get Married, 2007, laser cut silhouette, @ 17 x 15 inches

Paul Jenkins's chromatic pours. Jenkins, whose Paris apartment Lee Krasner was staying  in when she learned of JP's crash, inspired the painter character in Paul Mazursky's 1970s opus Unmarried Woman. Gossip aside, Jenkins was a spiritual seeker, who let the painting paint itself, and would have known the French Informel painters thoroughly.

William Crozier, Cafe, Aquatint

Rikrit Tiravanija's We Can Travel to the sun when it is setting, 2013, etching, screenprint, metal foil, horse hair, STPI handmade abaca paper: WOW for texture!

Detail - the juxtaposition of the metallic and the abaca thrills me to the marrow. 

Do Ho Suh's Circular Objects, New York, London, Berlin, Providence and  Seoul, Homes and Studios, 2018, cyanotype, 90 x 112. Cyanotype seems like such a trend now but I was really taken with the orderliness, organization, and scale of Suh's image.

Mickalene Thomas, whose collages and paintings feel timely and urgent right now on so many levels: feminine perspective, wallpapers and taste, race. 

The ever-amazing Judy Pfaff with details following. What a technician!

Richard Dupont, 2013. These were big. The materiality and painterly surface felt exciting.

The unceasingly great Joan Mitchell, iconic forever. She lived what she believed: freedom in landscape.

I'd used this as a cover photo for a time, and it was  thrilling to uncover this work IRL Joan Mitchell, translating form to material with prowess, confidence, and passion.

Insertion, a Frankenthaler woodcut, exquisite in its lightness--she worked long and hard with  a Japanese master printmaker to achieve the delicacy of edge, the perfect registration.

Joan Mitchell. 

Note to self: Picasso linocuts. The color. The raw line. The incision.

Picasso in situ.

Frankenthaler. Tale of Genji I, 1998, 34-color woodcut created with a  ukiyo-e trained Japanese carver.

Swoon at the entrance--her work is so free, abundant.