Founded in 1981, Alisan Fine Arts has been at the forefront of promoting Chinese contemporary art locally and internationally, as well as championing emerging female artists. We are excited to have the opportunity to show again at Art 021, after the three-year hiatus due to COVID-19. For our booth this year, we will present 4 established Chinese artists, namely Nan Qi, Walasse Ting, Wang Tiande and Xu Jianguo, who reinvigorate Chinese ink paintings with their own aesthetic innovation. Furthermore, we are showing 3 emerging female artists, namely Hui Hoi-Kiu, Angel, Wang Mengsha and Zhang Ying.  

For the established artists that we are showcasing, they have all received international acclaim for their unique visual languages or distinctive methods, which have brought traditional ink painting more into dialogue with our modern day lived experience. Our booth will start with two Shanghai artists, Wang Tiande and Xu Jianguo, where Wang uses incense burns to create his unique landscape paintings, and Xu paints modern day cityscapes in traditional classical Chinese style on silk, a combination of the old and the new. Then, a wall of Walasse Ting’s paintings will come into sight, with his brightly coloured women, parrots, horse, grasshoppers and fruits. At last, centred to our booth is Nan Qi, who is famous for his exploration of the ink medium with his 3-D dots.  

For the emerging female artists that we are showing, they have received different accolades so far regarding their artistic endeavour. Hui Hoi-Kiu, Angel paints traditional Chinese plates with modern motifs, blurring the concepts of old and new. Wang Mengsha paints common motifs found in traditional paintings, such as flowers, birds and scholar rocks, in a humorous manner. Zhang Ying uses her distinctive gongbi technique to create mesmerising composition of roaring waves and rocks, invoking a sense of contrast and power in a surreal background.  

Artists’ Bios   

Walasse Ting 

Born in Wuxi, Jiangsu in 1928, Walasse Ting is an artist celebrated for his colourful and bright depictions of animals, flora and sultry women. He briefly studied at the Shanghai Art Academy in the 1940s, before leaving for Paris in 1948 at the age of nineteen. There he became associated with artists belonging to the avant-garde group CoBrA. In 1957, he travelled to New York, where he befriended the American artist Sam Francis; here Ting became strongly influenced by Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. By the 1970s, he began experimenting with figures, developing the distinctive style that we are so familiar with today. His paintings are a sheer testimony to love, life and beauty. His paintings of women, flowers, cats, fish, horses, and watermelons are often painted in a rich palette of bright acrylics on rice paper, layered with powerful effervescent brushstrokes in Chinese ink.    

His first solo exhibition in mainland China was held at Shanghai Art Museum in 1997, and a major catalogue was published. After that, in 2007, he also participated in the Shanghai Ink Biennale at Zhu Qizhan Art Museum in Shanghai. His works have been collected by Shanghai Art Museum; Taipei Fine Arts Museum; Hong Kong Museum of Art; M+ Hong Kong, and several important art museums in Europe and America, including Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Chicago Institute of Art; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Tate Gallery, London; Musée Cernuschi, Paris.  

Wang Tiande 

Wang Tiande is an innovative avant-garde ink artist known for his creative use of incense sticks as a form of brush. Born in Shanghai in 1960, he studied at the College of Art in Shanghai in 1981, before pursuing further studies at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. After graduating in 1988 with a degree in traditional Chinese painting, he went on to obtain a Ph.D. in calligraphy in 2010 from the same academy. Well versed in traditional Chinese art and culture, Wang searches for further possibilities in the realm of ink art. His most ground-breaking creation, Chinese ink with burn marks on layered rice paper and the use of incense sticks in lieu of brushes to paint, transforms paintings of traditional landscapes and calligraphy while conveying the ephemeral quality of painting.    

In recent years, in addition to holding significant solo exhibitions at Suzhou Museum and Guangdong Museum of Art, Wang became one of the few living contemporary artists to have a solo exhibition at Beijing Palace Museum in 2015. His works have been collected by Chinese Painting Research Institute, Beijing; Zhong Nan Hai, Beijing; Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai; Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou; Shenzhen Art Museum, Shenzhen; Hong Kong Museum of Art; JP Morgan Bank, Hong Kong, and several important art museums in Europe and America, including British Museum, London; Cernuschi Museum, Paris; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver.  

Xu Jianguo 

Xu Jianguo, referred to stylistically as Da Diaozi ("Hue Cathcher"), was born in Shanghai in 1951. Straddling the artistic traditions of both Eastern abstract brushwork and Western colour sensibility, he melds both techniques to create works that push the boundaries of contemporary art. Xu's unique medium, the integration of rice paper with Sumi ink and watercolour with canvas, acrylics, and oil paints, testifies to his cross-cultural heritage. The China Pavilion featured Xu Jianguo's handscroll The New Vista of Shanghai for the 2010 Shanghai Expo. From 2010, a solo exhibition sponsored by the US Missions travelled to prominent museums in China, including the Beijing Capital Museum (Fall 2010), Shanghai Art Museum (Spring 2011), Guangdong Provincial Museum (Spring 2012) and National Museum of China (Autumn 2013).    

Currently Xu's painting is on view at the Song: The Golden Era of Chinese Aesthetics at Museum of Fine Arts Boston in the United States. Alongside masters of the Song Dynasty such as Ma Yuan, Mi Fu, and Xia Yong, Xu has become the first living artist to be exhibited alongside these masters, sharing the same platform. Xu’s works also have been exhibited in the Brooklyn Museum, Smith College, Boston Museum College, and other institutions across the United States.  

Nan Qi 

Born in Yongkang, Zhejiang in 1960, Nan Qi was trained in classical landscape ink painting at the People’s Liberation Army Fine Arts Academy in Beijing. Over the years, his subject matter has ranged from mountain landscapes to Chinese cultural icons, and more recently to iconoclastic images of the Visa logo, currency symbols and military parades composed by myriads of overlaid ink dots with an effect of eerie 3-D. He is currently developing a new series of Chinese landscape paintings. Deriving inspiration from ancient masters including Guo Xi from the Song Dynasty and Huang Gongwang from the Yuan Dynasty, Nan Qi has contemporised the historical landscapes with the use of his 3-D dots, resulting in a monochrome, hazy vista that is at once both challenging and cutting edge.    

His works have been collected by National Museum of China, Beijing, China Wuhan Art Museum, Wuhan, China UBS AG Shanghai, and Burger Collection, Hong Kong; and overseas museum collections include The Luxe Art Museum, Singapore; Foundation of Chinese Art Development, Singapore.  

Wang Mengsha 

Born in 1982 Wuxi, Wang Mengsha grew up in an artistic family. In 2006 she graduated from the Xi’an Academy of Fine Art, having studied animation. Since then she has completed advanced studies at Griffith University, in Queensland Australia, and the University of Southampton, in the United Kingdom. In her unique ‘Xieyi’ style of paintings, Wang adopts a sense of humor to innovatively combine aspects of traditional paintings of court maidens and beauties with landscape paintings. Akin to the eminent artist Walasse Ting, with whom she shares a hometown, Wang is associated with bright colours and calligraphic strokes. However, as a female artist she applies a feminine perspective to examine the past and look at the future in ways that redefine contemporary ink art in history and modern culture.    

In 2021 Wang received Top 10 Artistic Value Award in Beijing. In 2022, she collaborated with different institutions in mainland China to launch artworks, such as collaborating with trending indigenous Chinese brand “Guan Xia '' to develop a unique packaging for new fragrance "Suzhou Sweet”, collaborating product titled “Bobocat x Wang Mengsha” with the online art trading platform “Rodeo Art”. Over the years, she has also exhibited at Today Art Museum, Beijing; Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai; College of Fine Art Nanjing Art Institute, Nanjing, China; University of Edinburgh Library, UK; Galerie 99, Germany; China Cultural Centre, Tokyo, Japan; International Art Centre, Jeju, South Korea. Her work has been recently acquired by a trustee of the New Hall Art Collection, a collection of modern and contemporary art by women artists, to be placed on loan at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, UK.

Hui Hoi-Kiu, Angel

An emerging artist who is famous of her amazing ink work on tissue paper in recent years, Hui  Hoi-Kiu, Angel, is fascinated in daily objects and often discovers new meaning in them by twisting traditional art form and appropriating common materials to become part of her artwork, and therefore, creating the tension of usefulness between artworks and mundane objects. She has received numerous art awards, including Societe Generale 'Call for Artists' Award in 2022; Excellence Award, Art Next Expo International Artist Award in 2019; scholarship from China Education Development Foundation in 2016 and 2017; Silver Award of New Art Wave International Artist in 2015; Outstanding Award from the 10th ‘L&XF’ China Fashion Illustration Competition in 2011, and was one of the finalists of The Hong Kong Fine Art Prize in 2014.

She has exhibited her works in Hong Kong, Macau, Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, and Australia. In 2016, Hui was invited by Lane Crawford to create an art window display showcasing her modern interpretation of Chinese traditions travelling Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and Hong Kong. In 2019, she was invited to exhibit at Rosewood Beijing group show by the Office of the Government of HKSAR in Beijing. This year Hong Kong Museum of Art commissioned her to do a large ceramic installation to celebrate their 40th anniversary.   

Zhang Ying

Zhang Ying received her undergraduate and graduate degrees from the China    Academy of Art, Hangzhou. Though she specialised in ink and figure painting, she is drawn to the spiritual qualities of the Chinese landscape painting tradition and has focused the last few years of her practice on landscape, rock and tree paintings. Chinese painters of the past portrayed landscapes to reflect the vastness of the universe. Similarly, rocks represented a microcosm of nature to which artists turned for inspiration and meditation. Zhang draws from these legacies and transforms them into her personal visual language. According to the artist, she endeavors to create a space for reflection between the present and the spiritual. Indeed, there is a meditative quality in each of her paintings—along with their poetic titles—that invites our contemplation.    

Zhang had her first solo exhibition in 2017 in Beijing, and has had participated in close to 20 group exhibitions in Hangzhou, Beijing, Hong Kong, and London. The most recent one was this year at Qiushui Villa in Hangzhou. Her work is collected by China Academy of Art, Hangzhou.