Bingyi: The Eyes of Chaos

INKstudio is proud to announce Bingyi’s third solo exhibition at the gallery entitled Bingyi: The Eyes of Chaos. An artist, architectural designer, curator, cultural critic, and social activist, Bingyi (b. 1975, Beijing) has developed a multi-faceted practice that encompasses land-and-environmental art, site-specific architectural installation, musical and literary composition, ink painting, performance art, and filmmaking. In “The Eyes of Chaos” INKstudio will debut Bingyi’s latest grand, speculative narrative about art and its relationship to nature, literature, history and politics as retold or re-imagined from a woman’s point of view.

Bingyi tells her story through two bodies of work resulting from her investigations over the past five years into the origins of the ink monochrome landscape in China: The Eyes of Chaos: Temple of the Matriarch of Painting—the organic development of Bingyi’s land-and-environment art practice into historical landscape painting; and Dream within a Dream within a Dream—a speculative, archaeological reconstruction of the life of Hua, the “Matriarch of Painting.”

In 2018, Bingyi debuted a new artistic practice employing “speculative archaeology” whereby a historical discourse is interrogated through the creation and archaeological contextualization of counterfactual artifacts. Through her Matriarch of Painting, Bingyi speculates on a world and an aesthetic system built upon a woman’s point of view. In the name of Hua, Bingyi creates a complete set of political, economic, painting and religious classical texts, as well as related aesthetic systems encompassing painting, architecture, poetry, calendrical studies and history. This alternative aesthetic system effectively de-centers the patriarchal, Confucian, brush-centered and humanistic mode of literati landscape painting that official history preserves and re-centers the expressive possibilities of brush and ink art on nature, on water, on Taoism, and on a singular woman’s point of view.

The central installation of the exhibition The Eyes of Chaos features a monumental and immersive eight-panel ink-monochrome landscape 3.7 meters high and 12 meters wide entitled Taihang Rhapsody, created during Bingyi’s 2020-2023 research trips to the Taihang Mountains in Northern China’s Eastern Yellow-River Loess.

About the artist
Born in Beijing and educated in the United States, Bingyi received her PhD in art history from Yale University in 2005 where she specialist in the literature and culture of the Han Dynasty. Bingyi has exhibited internationally at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2022–23), Art Basel Hong Kong Encounters (2022, 2017), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2021), the Brooklyn Museum (2019) the National Art Museum of China (2017), Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art (2016), Istanbul Modern (2016), Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Alicante, Alicante, Spain (2014), St. Johannes-Evangelist-Kirche, Berlin, Germany (2012), Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, Chicago, USA (2010) and The 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008).

About the curator
Dr. Britta Erickson is an independent scholar and curator living in Palo Alto, California. She has curated major exhibitions at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, D.C. (Word Play: Contemporary Art by Xu Bing) and the Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford (On the Edge: Contemporary Chinese Artists Encounter the West). In 2007 she co-curated the Chengdu Biennial, which focused on ink art and has produced a series of short films about contemporary ink art entitled The Enduring Passion for Ink. Ms. Erickson is on the advisory boards of The Ink Society (Hong Kong) and Three Shadows Photography Art Centre (Beijing), as well as the editorial boards of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art and ART Asia Pacific. In 2006 she was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship. She received her PhD in Chinese Art History from Stanford University.

About INKstudio
INKstudio is an art gallery based in Beijing and New York. Its mission is to present experimental ink as a distinctive contribution to contemporary transnational art-making in a closely-curated exhibition program supported by in-depth critical analysis, scholarly exchange, bilingual publishing, and multimedia production. INKstudio’s program encompasses Postwar and contemporary artists from Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, Korea and Japan.