Asia Art Center is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition Shen Qin · Chen Qi, opening on October 24, 2026. This marks the artists' second joint exhibition at Asia Art Center, following Mountain House of Sliced Stones: Artworks of Shen Qin and Chen Qi (Beijing, 2021), "Exhibition of Works by Shen Qin and Chen Qi" (Beijing, 2015), and Shen Qin, Chen Qi: Zero Degree (Taipei, 2016).
Witty Remarks and a Fine Story: On the Paintings of Shen Qin and Chen Qi
Ji Shaofeng
More than a decade ago, Shen Qin casually suggested to Chen Qi, “Why don’t we put on an exhibition together?” What began as a jest became a celebrated art-world story. Following their joint solo exhibitions in 2015, 2016, and 2021, a fourth takes place in 2026. These exhibitions have become a signature program of Asia Art Center and left a lasting mark on explorations of contemporary Chinese art.
Shen Qin excels in ink painting, while Chen Qi masters water-based woodblock printmaking. Both artists’ imagery is “bound up with water,” evoking the abundance of worldly life and the stillness of withdrawal. They engage with the world while remaining inwardly detached. Shen Qin’s restrained ink paintings evoke the depth of still waters. Their vast, empty spaces, devoid of human presence, suggest simplicity, solitude, and transcendence through the release of delusions and distracting thoughts. Seclusion deepens into loneliness and uncompromising solitude. His solo exhibition Following His Own Path at Hubei Museum of Art, reveals his resolve to withdraw from the world and return to the inner self, clarity of mind, and insight into one’s true nature.
By contrast, Chen Qi’s water-based woodblock prints portray the profusion of worldly things with extraordinary refinement and precision. Their disciplined execution and fluid interplay among the artist’s hand, the print matrix, and water are striking. Minute details resist the unpredictable effects of diffusion, while surreal landscapes capture traces of “time” and “life” across dimensions. These qualities reflect Chen Qi’s temperament and inner disposition.
As artists of the same generation, Shen Qin and Chen Qi are major figures in contemporary Chinese art. Their significance recalls Bei Dao and Li Tuo’s editors’ note for the “Special Issue on the Seventies” of Today: “The generation we are referring to here is a relatively specific one, primarily those who spent their adolescence and youth in the 1970s. This generation grew up in a particular historical environment. The distinctiveness of that experience gave rise to an unusual group of young people, and it was precisely this group that came to play a highly important and distinctive role in Chinese society after the Cultural Revolution.” Both belong to this cohort, whose practices reflect twentieth-century transformations in China’s social, political, economic, and cultural structures.
Their shared choice of media “bound up with water” also reveals different spiritual pursuits arising from a common source. Water-based woodblock printmaking and ink painting, rooted in traditional culture, embody Chinese cultural identity. Their imagery expresses Chinese values and experiences, affirming the agency and subjectivity of Chinese culture.
For Shen Qin, water moves through ink across xuan paper, leaving traces of breath in wetness, dryness, density, and lightness, imbued with his character, learning, talent, and thought. For Chen Qi, water seeps across the woodblock and into the printed surface. Its flow also reflects his evolving styles and forms, artistic exchanges, and lineages of mentorship. Technical mastery emerges through the subtlest details.
Both artists re-engage traditional storytelling, using traditional motifs in dialogue with contemporary approaches. Rather than simply returning to tradition, they transform and renew traditional water-based woodblock printmaking and ink painting within modernity. They forge new relationships between tradition and the contemporary, abandonment and renewal, deglobalization and reglobalization, and de-Sinicization and renewed identification with Chinese culture, seeking fresh possibilities within a renewed tradition and a reglobalized world.
Turning independently to tradition, an original state of being, and the inner self, Shen Qin and Chen Qi reflect on rapid social change, history, and culture. Their work connects a distinguished past with a diverse, uncertain present, awakening viewers’ memories. Amid new technologies and capital in the tide of reglobalization, they affirm confidence in and conscious commitment to China’s own cultural traditions.
October 15, 2026, 3:25 p.m. | No. 1, Sanguandian, Donghu Road