Asia Art Center is honored to announce the representation of artist Lee Chung-Chung. Her works will be presented at this year's ART TAIPEI, followed by a solo exhibition at Asia Art Center (Taipei) next year. For Asia Art Center, this new representation marks not only the beginning of a new collaboration, but also an important step in further contextualizing the development of modern ink painting in Taiwan within the gallery's ongoing engagement with post-war and modern art.
In 1942, Lee Chung-Chung was born into a family of traditional painters and calligraphers, she was introduced to ink painting at an early age under the influence of her father, Lee Jin-yu. In 1965, after graduating from the Art Department of the Political Warfare Cadres School, now the Fu Hsing Kang College of National Defense University, in Taiwan, Lee devoted herself to ink painting while continually resisting the limitations of conventional brush-and-ink practice. As art historian Hsiao Chong-Ray remarkes, "Her works possess both the solidity and depth of tradition and the lightness and ingenuity of modernity; within their vigour lies a graceful and delicate resonance of ink." Beginning with ink, Lee gradually developed a freer abstract language, reopening the spirit, spatial consciousness, and modes of seeing embedded in Eastern painting within the context of modern art.
In Lee Chung-Chung's paintings, points, lines, and planes often unfold with a light yet fluid rhythm. The diffusion of ink, the expansion of color, and the textures formed through rubbing and washes allow her works to retain, beyond their abstract forms, a connection to nature, landscape, and lived perception. Yet this lightness is never slight. Lee once said, "I hope my works can have the vibration of an elephant stomping heavily on the ground." The statement reveals her pursuit of weight, force, and inner tension within the pictorial field. Rather than positioning her practice as a radical break from tradition, Lee has developed, through sustained and patient exploration, a clear and distinctive artistic language between tradition and modernity.
Since 1970, Lee Chung-Chung's works have been exhibited across the United States, Europe, China, Japan, and Korea. Her works are held in the collections of the National Museum of History, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Tainan Art Museum, Fukuoka Art Museum in Japan, Qingdao Art Museum in China, and other institutions. She held a solo exhibition at Taipei Fine Arts Museum in 1991 and exhibited at the National Museum of History in 1994. In recent years, her work has continued to receive renewed attention: she participated in Art Basel Hong Kong from 2017 to 2025 and presented solo exhibitions at Taipei Dangdai in 2020 and 2022.
In 2024, Lee Chung-Chung presented two major solo exhibitions: Landscape Variations—Lee Chung-Chung's Ink Art Journey at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, and The Dialogue between Water and Ink—The Painting World of Lee Chung-Chung at the Fine Arts Museum of National Defense. Together, these exhibitions offered a comprehensive view of her decades-long exploration of water and ink. Through its forthcoming exhibitions and representation of Lee Chung-Chung, Asia Art Center looks forward to bringing her work to a wider audience in Taiwan and abroad, and to deepening the understanding of the rich layers that modern ink painting in Taiwan has generated across generations, media, and aesthetic turns.