Wang Shaoqiang
2025 Moordn Art Fair will be held as scheduled from December 18th to 21st at the Guangzhou Haizhu International Convention & Exhibition Center. For this edition, Asia Art Center is proud to present the latest works by thirteen core artists: Ju Ming, Wang Jieyin, Zheng Zaidong, Shen Qin, Chen Qi, Chen Shuxia, Li Chen, Sang Huoyao, Wang Shaoqiang, Yang Liming, Wu Didi, Hang Chunhui, and Guo Jianlian. The exhibited works encompass a diverse range of mediums, including oil painting, ink wash, printmaking, and sculpture.
Zheng Zaidong (b. 1953, Taipei) creates works characterized by rich, delicate colors, an elegant yet solitary atmosphere, and a touch of playful whimsy. His overall compositions are restrained and subtly sparse. The worlds he depicts explore ideal spaces for dwelling and contemplation sought by the inner self, attempting to reconcile and balance opposing thoughts and beliefs, thereby offering viewers in today's hectic and complex society a spiritual sanctuary—a place to reside, wander, and enjoy a moment of tranquility. Zheng forges a unique path by returning to Eastern artistic traditions, shifting the focus from the human figure to landscapes, often miniature ones, imbued with a distinct Eastern sensibility. Yet these landscapes transcend reality, woven from an interplay of real and virtual elements. While the artist's self-image recedes from the canvas, an introverted and poetic spirit pervades the work. These more liberated and expansive landscapes can still be read as the artist's autobiography, revealing a personal inner conflict finding balance and seeking new breakthroughs within a vaster temporal and spatial framework.
Chen Shuxia (b. 1963, Wenzhou, Zhejiang) unfolds her painting in stillness, where colors float like breath and forms hover between presence and absence. Through minimalistic yet layered techniques, she blurs the boundaries between color and texture, allowing natural elements like light, dust, water, and air to settle gradually on the canvas, coalescing into a space that is minimal yet enduringly perceptible. Her painting evokes a rhythm of viewing through the vibration of materials and the flow of artistic spirit (qiyun), prompting viewers to recalibrate their perceptual mechanisms through micro-tactile experiences. This language of "subtlety" (dan) does not rely on narrative or symbolism but guides the viewer into a realm of the "unmanifested" through its inherent rhythm and sense of breath.
Wang Jieyin (b. 1941, Shanghai) As an elder artist born in the 1940s in Shanghai, Wang Jieyin's artistic practice returns to the origin of painting: constructing classical landscape painting, or responding to the possibility of nature's regeneration, through the abstract "dot." This is not a direct return to landscape painting but a search for a new starting point. The artist purely uses "dots" to construct a world of nature's inner movement. On one hand, this relates to his contemplation of oil painting. In his Great Landscape series, he employs a Paul Klee-like simplification, using lines and triangles to build imagistic landscapes, infused with vast, earth-toned darkness, capturing the spirit of nature. Similarly, Wang applies this black texture to ink wash, but the difference lies, on the other hand, in moving towards the "pure dot," "pointing" towards another profound and ever-changing world: circular dots, ink dots or moss dots from landscape painting, zero points, digital pixels, clicks. Occasionally incorporating acrylic paint adds luminosity and thickness, granting the two-dimensional plane a multidimensional variation of light, shadow, and space. This is the breath and revolution of the dot, reconstructing a new landscape of rotation and mystery, where a robust aura conjures collective portraits of the digital age, allowing naive playfulness and vigorous antiquity to coexist.
Chen Qi (b. 1963, Nanjing) Chen Qi's works are often described as "possessing both Eastern rationality and poetry." His rationality stems from a profound sensitivity to order: layers of imprints, meticulous patience, and an almost religious devotion. His poetry, however, resides in the blank spaces left behind by that rationality—as seen in series like Time Score, it embodies compassion for time, quiet contemplation of life, and echoes of the universe. He allows "technique" to become the gateway to the "Way" and "form" to become the mirror of the "mind-heart". In this sense, the exhibition title "Therefore" responds to Wang Yangming's concept of "nothing exists outside the mind" and also embodies the principle of the "unity of knowledge and action." It suggests that the purpose of art is not to "preach" but to allow viewers to "realize" why things are as they are—a physical experience from "cause" to "effect," a migration of wisdom from "knowing" to "awareness." When viewers encounter his works, with their interplay of light and shadow and complex structures, they are often drawn into a tranquil logic where rationality and sensibility intertwine, and order coexists with chance. It is a sense of balance infused with Eastern wisdom, a mode of thought that does not premise itself on opposition but aims for harmony. Starting from water-based woodblock prints and exploring various cross-media forms such as ink on paper, paper sculpture, and jade carving, Chen Qi consistently contemplates the ontology of existence within the logic of the "imprint." Each of his works embodies the mutual generation of "imprinting" and "being imprinted"—the artist is both creator and the one "imprinted" by time and matter. Colorless: The highest form of art is the abstract manifestation of ideas. Form is content; technique is concept.
Shen Qin (b. 1958, Nanjing, Jiangsu) emerged as an innovator during the '85 New Wave art movement with his ink wash creations. His works construct a unique ink space characterized by lightness, transparency, and ethereality, capturing the material expressiveness of ink within misty serenity. Shen adeptly employs light ink washes combined with delicate, concentrated ink lines, creating contrasts between void and solid, light and dense, to form a visual field open to multiple interpretations. His spatial treatment extends the surreal undertones of his early work, fusing the tangible and virtual, time and space, to present a restrained yet powerfully expressive artistic language.
Wang Shaoqiang (b. 1969, Shantou, Guangdong) Within the diverse landscape of contemporary abstract art, Wang Shaoqiang builds a visual bridge across cultures through his unique cultural and formal language. Seeking the presence of nature within the Xuan paper and ink, he melds Bauhaus compositional theory with the Eastern philosophical view of nature into a visual language of minimalist planes. This not only achieves a contemporary transformation of traditional media but also offers new possibilities for interpreting the spiritual dimension of abstract art in a contemporary context. As Zhuangzi said, "Heaven and earth have great beauty but do not speak"—the image becomes the sensible manifestation of the rhythm, structure, and cadence of "Qi" (vital energy). This ability to translate philosophical concepts into visual experience elevates the abstract language of the Compound project beyond formal play, arriving at an inquiry into the essence of all things. Within Compound, ink wash is no longer a label of "Eastern-ness" but a medium that, together with color and structure, builds a spiritual order. This "medium consciousness" grants it equal footing for dialogue within the context of abstract art. At a time when contemporary art faces the dilemma of "dissolution of meaning," Compound, with its precise mastery of formal language and steadfast adherence to spiritual core, demonstrates that abstract art remains a valid path for questioning the nature of the world.
Sang Huoyao (b. 1963, Zhejiang) The theoretical name "Sang's Square" refers to a process of semiotic reduction, extracting scenographies with semiotic significance from real life and transforming them into symbolic "speech" using contemporary Chinese ink wash. The resulting artistic "language," possessing personal expressive criteria and norms, marks the formation of the artist's "self" ink symbolism system. The overlapping squares and the shimmering, elusive "light" that permeates them in his paintings complete the vivid conveyance of artistic spirit in Sang's ink works and the metaphysical perception encapsulated in the Chinese aesthetic thought: "The greatest music has the faintest notes; the greatest form is beyond shape." In recent years, Sang has actively explored the boundaries of ink wash, intensifying the use and effect of color, thereby enhancing the expressive power of Chinese art in a contemporary context. Using monochromatic blocks as an artistic matrix, an abstract ink-brush language as internal structure, and a "Realm-Imagism" art rooted in Chinese tradition as his creative, he attempts to build a bridge for dialogue between rational Western abstract art and Eastern philosophy.
Wu Didi (b. 1976, Chongqing) The Gesture of Irrationality is itself a fantasy; only the gesture can be displayed. In a world where every moment is shaped by external conditioning and discipline, we constantly plan ourselves, spy on ourselves, choreograph ourselves… Ubiquitous consciousness often collapses under excessive consciousness, just as information collapses under an overload of information. We seem to have long forgotten our "naked life"—that pure, undisciplined posture of life stripped of all social attributes. Here, bamboo serves as a deconstruction of the traditional simulacrum of "bamboo," returning it to a pre-symbolic state, a state of primitive growth and primitive gesture. It simply "is" there, releasing itself, existing in an authentic manner. There is no thought in nature; the state of nature is unimaginable; there is no thought here. As Baudrillard said, "They display themselves without worrying about their life, or even their existence."
Hang Chunhui (b. 1976, Anhui) "Book" and "Frame" are enduring motifs in Hang Chunhui's practice, which undergo a deeper material transformation in his new works presented here. The "book" no longer carries readable content but is transformed into an impenetrable volume. Its form hovers between architectural component and relic of knowledge, becoming a suspended perceptual apparatus. Notably, he incorporates highly textural materials such as mineral pigments and gold leaf, complemented by sculptural textural treatments, infusing the image surface with elements of chance and irreproducibility.
Yang Liming (b. 1975, Sichuan) His work responds to the question of the regeneration of Chinese painting tradition in a contemporary context, merging Eastern spirit with the formal logic of abstract painting through the physical act of "calligraphic" brushwork, narrating a contemporary perception of "Qi." After his Blue, Black, and Red periods, his current work (2020-) has entered a White phase. White here becomes a field for meditation, symbolizing both purification and silence, while also pointing to the flow of consciousness and the sedimentation of time. Within the depths of that white, there seems to be the breath of the universe's birth, quietly resonating. Thick textures formed through layered applications create relief-like structures, revealing the ethereal and static beauty of wabi-sabi. The faintly discernible blue-grey tones within the canvas, like the faint light at the edge of the atmosphere, contrast with the pure white, constructing a visual tension between light and obscurity, void and substance.
Li Chen (b. 1963, Taiwan, China) Li Chen's early engagement with Buddhism and Daoism infused his spirit of free creation with introspective emotion. Absorbing the traditional Eastern artistic spirit (qiyun) and Western sculptural aesthetics, and combined with contemporary thought, his work is not bound by any single tradition. His sculptures, rendered in a profound yet weighty "ink-black," achieve an effortlessly natural effect. Li Chen engages in personal "spiritual healing" through art, seeking paradise within the mundane, creating spiritual spaces in his works, and using humor and wit to subtly allude to worldly affairs. Something Within: Some see it as wealth, or a secret treasure and means not shown to others; more poetically, one might imagine holding a firefly—it is open to your imagination. Upon closer observation, one can see the figure's cloak, suddenly imbuing it with a new sense of power. The lower part of the feet has the texture of stone cliffs, and the figure adopts a combative stance, reminiscent of a Maori Haka. This creates a sense of both correspondence and contradiction. Viewers can interpret it as an obsession with control or as steadfast guardianship.
Ju Ming (b. Taiwan, China) Ju Ming's creations fundamentally revolve around core themes of Eastern philosophy, such as the "unity of heaven and humanity" and "the Dao follows nature." Through a combination of abstraction and figuration, he conveys a profound understanding of the essence of life and reverence for the cosmic order. In his most iconic Tai Chi series, Ju Ming skillfully employs the concept of the interdependence of yin and yang. Through the contrast and harmony of sculptural forms, he manifests the philosophical idea of the mutual dependence and transformation of all things in the universe.
