BINGYI: LAND OF IMMORTALS
An exhibition sponsored by INKstudio at Joan B Mirviss LTD during Asia Week New York 2022
March 14–26, 2022
Joan B Mirviss LTD
39 E 78th St Suite 401
New York, NY 10075
The Taihang Mountains paintings evoke the lofty mountains and valleys of Song landscapes, butwhat lingers in the viewer’s mind is not their compositions, but rather the vivid rhythms of themyriad things communicated through the vibrations and nuances of brush and ink.
—Bingyi, Treatise on Landscape, 2022
Los Angeles-based artist, writer, film-maker, curator, cultural critic, and social activist
Bingyi (b. 1975, Beijing) will premier Land of Immortals a new body of contemporary ink
painting in a joint exhibition between INKstudio (Beijing) and Joan B. Mirviss (NewYork) during Asia Week New York 2022. Bingyi’s contemporary ink paintings will beshown alongside the contemporary ceramics of master artist Kondō Takahiro (b. 1958,Kyoto) in his concurrent solo exhibition Kondō Takahiro: Making Waves.
Land of Immortals will feature Bingyi’s most recent landscape paintings, created duringand following her 2020-2021 research trip to the Taihang Mountains in Northern
China’s Eastern Yellow-River Loess. The Taihang Mountains were home to three ink
painters of the Song Dynasty (960-1279) who defined China’s monumental landscapepainting tradition: Fan Kuan (c.960-c.1030), Guo Xi (c.1020-c.1090), and Li Tang (c.1050-1130). From this history, Bingyi reconstructs an alternative landscape tradition thatspeaks not just to classical art connoisseurs in China and East Asia but to the global
audiences of contemporary art today.

"Eight Views of Bewilderment," ink on paper, 34×34cm (each album), 2021.

Born in Beijing and educated in the United States, Bingyi received her Ph.D. in art
history from Yale University in 2005. Like the great literati artists of the past, Bingyi
approaches painting as a personal practice of spiritual self-cultivation, as a speculativeinquiry in the history of art and culture, and most importantly as an exploration into
the nature of creativity.
In her pursuit of a contemporary art language based on the traditional materials ofbrush, ink and paper, Bingyi uses ink as "dark light" to illuminate the partly invisible
qualities and always transient behavior of water—nature’s universal solvent. By adding
ink to water, Bingyi makes water and its behavior—such as flow, turbulence, diffusionand evaporation—visible to the human eye. Privileging the capacity of ink to makevisible the qualities and processes of water and by extension nature, Bingyi creates analternative history in which the brush mark expresses not the ego or the experience of
the artist but rather serves the capacity of ink to express the qualities and processes ofnature.
About the Artworks
Unlike the conventional history of the “literati” landscape, which is primarily Confucian
in nature, Bingyi’s speculative, heterodox history employs themes both Buddhist andDaoist to articulate a world of creative change and transformation that encompasses
both nature and the nature of mind.
In the album, Eight Views of Bewilderment, Bingyi imagines an alternative to theEight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers a classical poetic and pictorial theme set inthe Northern Song. In Bingyi’s conception, the eight views represent eight kinds of"Land of Immortals," from left to right: Green Dragon,White Tiger, Vermillion Phoenix, Black Tortoise andSnake, ink on paper, 66×33 cm (each scroll), 2021.

phenomenological experience accessible to the human mind. In naming her albumwangxiang 罔象八景 , she cites a story from the Zhuangzi (c.4th Century B.C.) in which theunlikely character Xiang Wang 象罔 “Appears to be Ignorant” finds the way lost by theKing when others who appear more qualified fail.
In the four hanging scrolls, Land of Immortals, Bingyi steps back into Han Dynasty(206BC-AD220) cosmology to explore the correspondence between the celestial andthe earthly, the cosmic and the bodily. Each scroll—Green Dragon (East), White Tiger(West), Vermillion Phoenix (South), Black Tortoise and Snake (North)—represents one of
the Si Xiang 四象 or Four Mythical Gods and its associated cardinal direction and stellar
constellations. Adding a center to the four cardinal directions, however, transforms
the four directions into the five phases—Wood, Metal, Fire, Water and Earth. In thisway, space (the four directions) and process unfolding in time (the five phases) findcorrespondence and unity.
In the two hanging scrolls White Clouds and Dark Beasts and Sound of the Empty Valley,
Bingyi explores the mutually constitutive relationship between form and emptiness,
active and passive, change and continuity—what in early Chinese thought is calledyang and yin—alternating in never ending cycles of change and transformation. White
Clouds and Dark Beasts cites a poem by Du Fu (712-770)—“a white cloud at one moment
may look like a grey dog in the next”—conveying the idea that circumstances change
from moment to moment in strange and unexpected ways. Sound of the Empty Valley, on
the other hand, references Fan Kuan’s iconic landscape Travelers Among Mountains andStreams and how the still and empty space surrounding a monumental central peak isnevertheless resonant with movement and sound.

"Taihang Rhapsody," from left to right: White Clouds
and Dark Beasts, Sound of the Empty Valley, ink onpaper, 138 ×69 cm (each scroll), 2021.

The Other Shore: Paramita, ink on paper, 97x180 cm,2021.

In the monumental single horizontal scroll, Paramita—literally “the Other Shore”—
Bingyi depicts the land of illusion and human suffering and the other shore of perfectenlightenment linked by a bridge. The image of crossing over to the other shore is therealization of perfect enlightenment. In Chan Buddhism, however, the “other shore” ofperfect enlightment is inseparable, identical, one-and-the-same with the shore of humansuffering. The place that you left and the place where you arrive are one place.
About INKstudio
INKstudio is an art gallery based in Beijing and New York. Its mission is to present
Chinese experimental ink as a distinctive contribution to contemporary transnational
art-making in a closely-curated exhibition program supported by in-depth criticalanalysis, scholarly exchange, bilingual publishing, and multimedia production.
INKstudio's program encompasses Postwar and contemporary artists from China,Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea and Japan including Bingyi, Chang Yahon, Chen Haiyan,
Cheng Yen-ping, Dai Guangyu, He Yunchang, Hung Fai, Huang Chih-yang, Inoue Yuichi, Jeong Kwang-hee, Kim Jong-ku, Lee In, Li Jin, Li Huasheng, Lim Hyun-lak, Lim Oksang, Liu Dan, Peng Kang-long, Ethan Su Huang-sheng, Tao Aimin, Wai Pong-yu, Wang
Dongling, Wang Tiande, Wei Ligang, Xu Bing, Yang Jiechang and Zheng Chongbin andexhibits works of diverse media, including painting, calligraphy, sculpture, installation,performance, photography, and video. Since its inception in 2012, INKstudio has
regularly appeared at art fairs such as the Armory Show (New York), Art Basel Hong
Kong, and West Bund Art & Design (Shanghai) and placed works into major publiccollections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museumof Art, Brooklyn Museum, and M+, Hong Kong.
PerformanceMarch 23, 2022, 6:30 pm US Eastern Time
China Institute
100 Washington StreetNew York, NY 10006
For more information: https://www.chinainstitute.org/event/bingyis-lotus-dynasty/

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