Third Text

6 May 2026

Alex Burchmore

The phrase ‘Chinese art’, for many, likely conjures visions of otherworldly landscapes, elegant bird-and-flower paintings and fluid lines of calligraphy, united by a monochromatic palette of black ink in spider-thin lines, confident strokes and atmospheric washes. Aesthetically, these may evoke a gestural mastery of the brush and heightened sensitivity to subtle tonal shifts, or perhaps an absence of pictorial variety and devotion to a timeless tradition. Socially, culturally and politically, they might suggest Daoist impulse and Buddhist transcendence, or, conversely, Confucian hierarchy and Maoist ‘harmony’. Laura Vermeeren, in Ink Studies, her ethnographic analysis of current calligraphic cultures in mainland China, deftly shows that all such associations reveal the persistence of a reductive yet enduring historical teleology, mobilised by the state to project national strength and cultural renewal. Luise Guest, in Invisible Ink, her reflection on the diverse practices of five contemporary artists from China who work at the intersection of ink art and feminist performance, similarly exposes the classed and gendered interests sustaining these bastions of traditional authority. Both scholars offer fresh insight into the vitality, diversity and complexity of a tradition that is far from static.

Vermeeren and Guest alike set out to illuminate previously overlooked or undervalued aspects of the indelible yet increasingly fluid tradition of ink, which has gained new visibility in recent years as a source of inspiration for contemporary artists. Much of this interest can be traced to the exhibition ‘Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China’ (11 December 2013 – 6 April 2014) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Drawing together paintings in oils and acrylics, woodblock prints, photography, even sculpture, video, installation and performance with historical examples of ink painting, curator Maxwell K Hearn argued for the existence of an ‘ink aesthetic’ that transcends traditional media yet maintains ‘an underlying identification with the expressive language of ink’. ^[1]  For art historian Sarah E Fraser, reflecting seven years later on the meteoric rise of the ‘East Asian Ink Art phenomenon’, the medium has become ‘a strategy in an experimental form’ that enables contemporary artists to leverage the cultural cachet of tradition while exploring their own conceptual and expressive ambitions. ^[2]

Guest and Vermeeren focus, respectively, on two streams of the ink tradition: ‘experimental ink painting’ (shiyan shuimo 实验水墨) and calligraphy (shufa 书法). However, like Hearn, Fraser and other recent writers in this field, they aim to complicate rather than simply reinforce the canonical authority of these disciplines. In addition to exploring how her case-study artists use ink ‘in a non-traditional, experimental, and sometimes transgressive manner’, Guest seeks to uncover ‘the previously neglected roles of women [in] both historical and contemporary manifestations of what we might call “ink language”’. ^[3]  This augments the revisionist ambition of her first monograph, Half the Sky: Conversations with Women Artists in China (2016), with a more historically grounded and conceptually refined focus. ^[4]  Vermeeren likewise aspires to counter ‘the simplified and dominant narrative’ of calligraphy by breaking down the artificial boundaries that separate ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture to reveal the ‘discontinuities, revivals [and] parallel existing systems’ that have always been part of this cultural lineage. Against prevailing visions of ‘a static and immemorial tradition’, she offers a new understanding of calligraphy as ‘a living and vibrant cultural scene’ that permeates many aspects of daily life in China, ‘from expensive rice paper to pavements to digital screens’. ^[5]  Both authors are driven, therefore, by an aspiration to enrich and diversify existing narratives.

Their desire to nuance rather than entirely reject the canon is clearest in the treatment of two artists, Wang Dongling (b 1945) and Bingyi (b 1975), whose work and life experiences would seem to situate them at opposite ends of the ‘ink aesthetic’ spectrum. Wang is generally held to be one of the most highly respected calligraphers alive today, upholding a lineage that can be traced back through his teacher, the renowned Lin Sanzhi (1898–1989), to the even more celebrated literatus Huang Binhong (1865–1955). He is also regarded, however, as a committed reformer who seeks to attract a broader audience of devotees by experimenting with a range of unconventional techniques, including his signature ‘large-scale calligraphy’ (jufu dazi shufa 巨幅大字书法) and almost illegible ‘chaos script’ (luanshu 乱书), frequently performed live in public settings. ^[6]  Bingyi, on the other hand, took up ink relatively late in her professional life, in 2008, after first pursuing a scholarly career that culminated in 2005 with a PhD in Art History from Yale University. Like Wang, she has a reputation for highly theatrical public performances and monumental scale, yet her technical experiments frequently blur the line between reform and iconoclasm. She rejects the brush in favour of leaf blowers and other such machines re-engineered to spray, pour and drip ink, while she has described the time-honoured traditions of landscape painting (shanshui 山水, literally ‘mountains and water’) as ‘rotten and decadent and indulgent’. ^[7]  Yet, at the same time, there are elements of Bingyi’s practice that could be said to embody Daoist ideals of spontaneity (ziran 自然) and non-action (wuwei 无为), long central to shanshui. Nevertheless, Bingyi hopes ‘to free herself from strictures, rules and limitations’, while Wang always preserves a ‘deference to the foundations of calligraphy’ even in his most daring experiments and can thus be hailed as ‘a respectable innovator’ rather than an enfant terrible. ^[8]  The distinction between these artists, as Guest and Vermeeren show, becomes above all one of framing, implying a flexible tradition that can encompass a range of perspectives.

In addition to expanding the material and conceptual boundaries of ink, both Vermeeren and Guest seek to counter the entrenched portrayal of this medium as ‘an ancient, culturally specific and elitist [art] for the old, the male and the well-educated’. ^[9]  Extensive interviews and field observations are central to their pursuit of this ambition, providing a rich empirical basis for the key arguments advanced in Ink Studies and Invisible Ink. Vermeeren draws throughout from conversations with calligraphy students and teachers, elderly ‘water calligraphy’ (dishu 地书) enthusiasts, practising calligraphers of varying levels of professionalism and renown, and digital typographic designers, conducted over five years in Beijing and Hangzhou. Guest’s interlocutors – contemporary artists Bingyi, Ma Yanling (b 1966), Tao Aimin (b 1974), Xiao Lu (b 1962) and Xie Rong/Echo Morgan (b 1983) – are less varied in their profession but similarly diverse in generational and individual experience. Both pursue ‘a research methodology based on encounters and conversation’, although Guest is more willing not only to incorporate but embrace the ‘miscommunication, false equivalences, incorrect assumptions and ungrounded conclusions’ that this ‘at times bewildering, awkward, and even difficult’ method can produce, seeking a transformative polyphony of voices. ^[10]

The most generative convergence across the two books arises from the parallels that can be drawn between Vermeeren’s close study of dishu and Guest’s insightful analysis of Tao Aimin’s and Ma Yanling’s separate engagement with nüshu (女书), or ‘women’s writing’. While dishu is usually translated as ‘water calligraphy’, giving priority to the medium, Vermeeren prefers the more literal ‘script [shu] of the ground [di]’, which instead emphasises the writing surface. She also moves decisively away from the frequent habit among scholars to frame the practice as a form of callisthenics, concentrating instead on the creative and aesthetic aspects of dishu in a visual analysis of three examples ‘from their inception until their disappearance’. ^[11]  Shu is generally used as a noun to refer to a book or other document, yet, as two of the translations given above indicate, it can also refer to ‘writing’ or ‘script’ (a calligraphic style). The title of renowned contemporary artist Xu Bing’s (b 1955) calligraphy-inspired installation Tianshu (天书; 1987–91), widely known as Book from the Sky, to which both Vermeeren and Guest refer, could thus be translated as ‘Writing from the Sky’, or even ‘Writing from Heaven’. The latter would in fact more closely approach the colloquial use of the term tianshu to mean ‘heavenly [obscure, abstruse, or illegible] writing’. While Vermeeren doesn’t note the linguistic analogy linking tianshu and dishu, the distinction between Xu Bing’s laboriously printed yet unreadable script and the fleeting yet orthodox writings of water calligraphers, is an illuminating one.

Xu Bing and other contemporary artists who engage with calligraphy are habitually framed as antagonistic to tradition. Reflecting on Tianshu and other iconic works – including Song Dong’s (b 1966) ongoing performance Writing Diary with Water (1995–  ), best known in a series of four photographs documenting the titular act – Vermeeren traces this tendency to the burden of expectation frequently placed on contemporary art to foster dissent and critique. The practice of water calligraphy, on the other hand, despite its improvisatory and ephemeral nature, does not seek to oppose tradition ‘but rather borrows from it, expands it and celebrates it’. ^[12]  Recent appearances of the practice in popular television series and even in official publicity campaigns, Vermeeren observes, further indicate its transgression of the often fragile borders separating the vernacular from the mainstream. Those who take up this pastime, generally retirees, use homemade oversize brushes fashioned from sponge or upholstery foam, cut to a point and attached to a repurposed broom, mop or umbrella stick with a plastic water bottle. They write in the paved areas of public parks amid ‘a cacophony of sound, movement, and creativity’, sparking animated conversation with other calligraphers and passersby. Their writing remains visible for only a few minutes before the water evaporates in the sun, or bleeds into illegibility, while everything about this suggests ‘buoyancy, flexibility, and deferral’. Yet their characters, Vermeeren observes, rarely deviate from canonical scripts and accepted stylistic conventions, while the most popular texts include Tang-dynasty (618–907) poetry, the Buddhist Heart Sutra and Maoist slogans. ^[13]  Some might experiment with a more spontaneous mode, responding to their surroundings or incorporating virtuosic sketches of other park visitors, but the intent is not one of critical subversion or a pursuit of the new for the sake of novelty alone.

This blend of adherence to tradition with creative experiment is a constant theme throughout Ink Studies, surfacing as one of the book’s most resonant insights. Calligraphy, Vermeeren notes, ‘seems at first sight wholly incompatible with creative aspirations... often explicitly juxtaposed with claims of creativity’ as a cipher for entrenched stereotypes of Chinese culture as one of unending reproduction and passive conformity. ^[14]  The persistence of these assumptions arises in large part from the corresponding image they imply of a ‘Western’ culture animated by the relentless march of progress, systematically laying waste to the redundancies of the past. Yet Vermeeren offers a more nuanced understanding that both moves beyond such tired binaries and, at the same time, promises to complicate commonly held models of ‘creativity’ itself ‘as a skill, a tool of power, a form of knowledge, and a quality [of] mind’. ^[15]  This is conveyed most effectively in her analysis of digital typographic design. After a succinct overview of ‘techno-linguistic’ turns throughout Chinese history, from ancient techniques of stencilling, rubbing and woodblock printing, through the invention of movable type, to the telegraph, typewriter and computer, Vermeeren observes that the implied teleology of such a progression is entirely undermined not only by their simultaneous use but by their shared connection to calligraphic form. Even with the translation of characters into four-digit numerical codes, this connection has been maintained. Contemporary font designers continue to ‘mobilise the past as a source of creative inspiration’, appropriating and adapting those aspects of tradition that most closely align with current needs yet ‘adhering to traditional rules and methods [with] the meticulous attitude of the calligrapher’. ^[16]

A comparable understanding of tradition as a fundamentally mobile and multiple inheritance is evident in Guest’s study of contemporary artistic uses of nüshu. In contrast to the ‘heavenly writing’ invented in the 1980s by Xu Bing and other largely Han, male, tertiary-educated and city-dwelling avant-gardists, including Gu Wenda (b 1955) and Wu Shanzhuan (b 1960), this script of unknown antiquity came into use among illiterate women of the Yao ethnicity in rural Hunan province. As such, nüshu offers a counter-tradition to the ‘rarefied canon of the male-dominated scholarly traditions of ink painting and calligraphy’, a ‘vernacular of the oppressed and marginalised’ that promises access to an otherwise unrecorded history from below. ^[17]  This is exactly how the script is used by Tao Aimin, who seeks both through a reclamation of nüshu and her creation of ink rubbings taken from washboards once used to scrub laundry to ‘[make] the unseen experiences of women visible’ and to carve out a space and lineage for their stories within the dominant patriarchal canon. ^[18]  For Ma Yanling, on the other hand, nüshu represents ‘[a] code of sisterhood’ that can unite women across generational divides, a secret language of suffering, anguish and grievance, but also of stoicism, empathy and catharsis, arising from shared experiences of menstruation, pregnancy and menopause, and the impact of state-led efforts to control fertility and reproduction. ^[19]  Yet Ma, too, acknowledges the historic lineage of nüshu and the legacies of the past in her conversations with Guest. For both artists, tradition is not (or not only) an external force to be resisted and critiqued, but also a valuable conduit between past, present and future that remains open to creative adaptation.

It is here, in Guest’s reflection on nüshu, much as Vermeeren’s nuancing of the binary enforced between tradition and creativity arises most visibly in her discussion of dishu, that one of the most potentially transformative assertions of Invisible Ink comes to light. The title of the book, as Guest explains in her preface, ‘refers broadly to the notion that women artists have been rendered (almost) invisible in accounts of contemporary art in China’ and more specifically to ‘the gendered history of ink painting and calligraphy’, comparably underacknowledged. ^[20]  The contemporary artistic appropriation of nüshu, in the context of this historical and discursive erasure, therefore represents not only a project of reclamation but the surfacing of a hitherto concealed continuum of practice within the established canon. Ella Shohat, whose advocacy for ‘a relational understanding of feminism’ is a key theoretical support for Invisible Ink, offers a model for this excavation. In a pair of essays written at the turn of the millennium, Shohat urged feminist scholars ‘to disinter stories of survival from the rubble of the master narrative of progress’ and proposed a rereading of the lives of women who had been marginalised by Eurocentric narratives of universalist progress ‘as a kind of subterranean, unrecognised form of feminism’. ^[21]  Guest’s argument for a counter-historiography of ink that centres women and their experiences, as well as a counter-strategy for writing this history that cultivates empathy, affect and bodily experience, responds directly to Shohat’s proposal.

Both Vermeeren and Guest show, then, that the canon is neither monolithic nor unilateral but rather is, and has always been, multivoiced and diverse. Following Shohat, they ‘dispute the idea that traditions are coherent, static, and uninterrupted’ and clearly show how practices of calligraphy and ink art are contested and internally contradictory to complicate ‘a misleading image of a homogeneous community’. ^[22]  Rather than a straitjacket of orthodoxy, tradition then becomes ‘a warehouse of possibilities’ with which contemporary artists, designers and other creative practitioners can engage from a diversity of perspectives. ^[23]  Inherent in such flexibility, however, is the reality that these possibilities can be seized not only by transgressive but also by conservative forces. Government and commercial programmes of investment, development and promotion appear alongside many of the case studies chosen for Ink Studies and Invisible Ink. Guest observes, for example, that nüshu has become an increasingly lucrative component of diplomacy and tourism since its official co-option as a practice of national intangible cultural heritage in 2006. Jiangyong County in Hunan now hosts a range of ‘nüshu hotels’ and ‘nüshu schools’ for young women, while in 2023 the major lifestyle retailer MINISO installed a nüshu-themed interactive experience in its flagship store in Xi’an to promote a new range of products ‘from paper fans to stationery and even pet supplies’ featuring the once-marginalised script. ^[24]  In 2015, Wang Dongling played a comparable role as a brand ambassador for Apple when he graced their flagship store in Hangzhou with a few lines of his signature large-scale calligraphy. This is one of many examples of official endorsement that Vermeeren cites, along with a range of policy initiatives, from the launch of the China Academic Digital Associative Library (CADAL) by the Ministry of Education and US National Science Foundation in 2002, and the ambitious ‘China Character Library Project’ of large-scale digitisation in 2006, through the introduction of compulsory calligraphy courses in primary and secondary educational curricula in 2013, to Xi Jinping’s declaration at the Symposium on Literature and Art Work in 2014 that ‘the creative rules of the ancients’ can contribute to ‘the innovative development of Chinese culture’. ^[25]

State interventions in everyday life also feature in Ink Studies and Invisible Ink in more complex guises, productively complicating the usual narrative of heroic resistance to state censure with a more nuanced perspective. Guest, for example, traces a tendency toward essentialism in the work of her case-study artists to a broader ‘reclamation of gender difference’ among women from the 1980s onward, in reaction to the denial and erasure of gendered distinctions during the Cultural Revolution. ^[26]  Thus, Xiao Lu refers in cited remarks throughout the second chapter to her identification with ‘an essential, “authentic” femaleness’, Tao Aimin imbues nüshu with ‘“feminine” virtues [of] selflessness, kindness and generosity’, and Ma Yanling aligns women’s artistic endeavours with ‘a female language, from a female perspective, with a female heart’. ^[27]  Vermeeren traces a parallel connection between a clear enthusiasm among older generations in contemporary China for making sure their children and grandchildren are taught calligraphy and their own denial of this opportunity in the 1960s and 1970s. At the same time, these same generations gained a confidence ‘in writing large characters, and... writing in public’ through their participation in the dazibao (大字报) or ‘big-character poster’ movement of the Maoist era, now expressed in water calligraphy, among other activities. Even while Red Guard factions destroyed many historic calligraphic scrolls, these dazibao ‘cover[ed] the entire nation in a sea of characters’, offering both a creative outlet and a crucial precedent for a renewed emphasis on calligraphy as a core focus of cultural reforms. Vermeeren notes the close coincidence, for instance, of the prohibition of dazibao in 1979 and the founding of the first official Calligraphy Association in 1981. ^[28]

Yet despite their appreciation for the complex intermingling of private and public spheres, and their analysis of tradition as a multiple and mobile inheritance, neither Guest nor Vermeeren look far beyond the mainland in their pursuit of such themes. Vermeeren reserves her analysis primarily for Beijing, as acknowledged in her preface, while each of Guest’s five artists were born and have spent much of their lives in the People’s Republic of China. ^[29] This is, to a certain extent, an unavoidable consequence of their methodological commitment to discussion with interlocutors and firsthand experience. Some reference to the longer history of ‘experimental ink painting’ and calligraphic cultures across the region, however, would have embedded the valuable arguments advanced in Ink Studies and Invisible Ink more firmly within scholarship of these phenomena in the larger Sinosphere.

In her discussion of the extent to which the recent history of calligraphy aligns with aspects of modern and contemporary art, for example, Vermeeren traces their entanglement to the New Culture Movement of the early twentieth century, through the aestheticist criticism of Zhang Yinlin (1905–1942) in the 1930s, to the organisation by Gu Gan (b 1942) of the ‘First Exhibition of Chinese Modern Calligraphy’ in 1985. ^[30]  This lineage is arguably incomplete without some mention of figures like Liu Kuo-sung (Liu Guosong, b 1932), who, while born in Anhui Province, fled the mainland in 1949 for Taiwan, where he earned a reputation as the ‘Father of Modern Ink Painting’, then lived and worked from 1971 until 1992 in what was then the British colony of Hong Kong. Here he built on the equally crucial work of Lui Shou-kwan (Lü Shoukun, 1919–1975), who had founded the ‘New Ink Movement’ in the late 1950s, through his influence as a teacher of several generations of students at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. ^[31]  It could be objected that Liu is more relevant to the development of ‘experimental ink painting’ than the artistic revival of calligraphy, yet, as Vermeeren notes, many proponents of the latter drew inspiration in their pursuit of calligraphic immediacy from American Abstract Expressionism. ^[32]  Guest, too, remarks on the association of Bingyi’s work, especially, with that of Jackson Pollock and other New York School artists, yet again makes no mention of the crucial place of Taiwan and Hong Kong in the story of contemporary ink art. ^[33]  Short of including analysis of artists from these contexts, Liu’s work at least merits citation for his adaptation of elements of Abstract Expressionism from his Taiwanese vantage in the 1950s and 1960s, bridging these otherwise disparate cultural spheres. ^[34]

Ink Studies and Invisible Ink are highly complementary texts with many points of intersection and parallel, of which those discussed here give only an initial indication. Reading the two books alongside each other also proves rewarding on a methodological level, with aspects of one further supporting certain lines of argument in the other. One of the core strengths of Vermeeren’s monograph, for example, is the skill with which she embeds contemporary lived realities within a deeper frame of historical reference, summarising key lines of development in an engaging manner ideally suited for those unfamiliar with the topic as well as for scholars of Chinese culture seeking to align her argument with their own areas of expertise. These brief summaries, precisely due to their brevity, can sometimes overlook more subtle complexities of interpretation and perspective – yet this is where Guest’s Invisible Ink offers a valuable foil. While the focus of her analysis remains resolutely on the contemporary, the ‘ghostly presence’ of the literati tradition shared by ink painting and calligraphy surfaces throughout as ‘a history redolent with masculine and class privilege and power’. ^[35]  By privileging those ‘subterranean’ elements within this history that have been relegated to invisibility – the story of nüshu, for instance – Guest presents a vital historiographic corrective. She thereby offers an ideal model for the ‘relational understanding of feminism’ that Shohat envisioned, embracing ‘the premise that genders, sexualities, races, classes, nations, and even continents exist not as hermetically sealed entities but, rather, as part of a set of permeable, interwoven relationships’. ^[36]

Guest’s historiographic complication of the accepted canon, in addition to the intersections of gender and class, also extends to a revalorisation of the performative as a central aspect of ‘experimental ink painting’. This is where Vermeeren’s Ink Studies, in turn, complements and strengthens the underlying argument of Invisible Ink. Guest details throughout how each artist ‘strategically inserts her female body and subjectivity into the canon of the historical literati’, reclaiming ‘the materiality and conceptual coding of black ink [to] represent... gendered [and] embodied experiences’, from pregnancy and motherhood to menstruation and menopause. ^[37]  In Ink Studies, Vermeeren likewise demonstrates how theories of calligraphy have long been ‘permeated with bodily metaphors of movement, force and body parts that serve as allegories to describe the calligraphic line’. An intimate connection is traced, for example, between the human body (shenti 身体) and the ‘script-body’ (shuti 书体) of a character, ‘referred to as fat [or] bony, but also as having blood, which is linked to energy and sinew’. She then details how calligraphy training involves a considerable amount of physical discipline, as students learn to control their movements with ‘almost military precision... concentrating on straightness and uprightness’ to ensure adherence to morally inflected exemplars. ^[38]  To Guest’s analysis of the artistic coding of ink with gendered bodily experiences, then, Vermeeren adds an appreciation for the extent to which the body has long been central for a practice stereotypically regarded as excessively abstract and fleshless to an alienating extreme.

Guest’s Invisible Ink and Vermeeren’s Ink Studies, both as standalone and corresponding texts, bring a much-needed depth of analysis to two aspects of contemporary Chinese artistic and cultural expression that have gained increasing global visibility over the past two decades. This visibility, unfortunately, has frequently not been accompanied by a nuanced understanding of their subtleties or an appreciation for their complex diversity. Stereotypes of mute adherence to a static tradition and uninspired copying devoid of creative spark persist in popular images of calligraphy, while ink painting seems indelibly stained by the same adulation of male genius that likewise frustrates a more complete understanding of Abstract Expressionism. With these two books, we are one step closer to shedding these tenacious tropes.

Laura Vermeeren, Ink Studies: Everyday Practices of Calligraphy in Contemporary China is published by University of Singapore Press, 2025, ISBN 978-981-325-297-4, 236 pp, 39 b/w images; Luise Guest, Invisible Ink: Feminism and Identity in Contemporary Chinese Art is published by Bloomsbury, 2026, ISBN 9781350433953, 216 pp, 50 colour illustrations

^[1]     Maxwell K Hearn, ‘Ink Art: An Introduction’, in Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2013, p 13. A comparable vision of ink art had notably arisen several years earlier in the Sinosphere in exhibitions including Zhongjie shuimohua! Cong “shuimohua” dao “shuimo” 終結水墨畫!從“水墨畫”到“水墨” [The End of Ink Painting! From “Shuimohua” to “Shuimo”], Da Xiang Art Space, Taichung, 2010; Chengchuan yu chuangzao: shuimo dui shuimo 承傳與創造:水墨對水墨 [Legacy and Creation: Shuimo vs Shuimo], Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai, 2010; and the Third Chengdu Biennale (14 September – 12 October 2007), which was entirely dedicated to ink art in various forms.

^[2]    Sarah E Fraser, ‘Beyond Ink: Contemporary Experimental Ink Art’, in Sarah E Fraser and Yu-Chieh Li, eds, Xu Bing: Beyond the Book from the Sky, Springer, Singapore, 2020, p 71. Comparable perspectives on the rise of a contemporary ‘ink aesthetic’ can be found in Tiffany Wai-Ying Beres, ‘After Ink: China’s Young Ink Painters – In Concept and Practice’, Art Asia Pacific 85, 2013, pp 94–103; Beres, ‘Beyond Ink: China’s Young Neotraditionalist Artists’, Art Asia Pacific 86, 2013, pp 88–99; and John Seed, ‘Contemporary Ink Painting: Continuity, Innovation and Hybridisation’, Arts of Asia, vol 46, no 5, 2016, pp 94–101.

^[3]    Luise Guest, Invisible Ink: Feminism and Identity in Contemporary Chinese Art, Bloomsbury, London, 2026, p 3, p 157. Fraser notably focuses on five male artists in the above-cited chapter, while Maxwell Hearn’s Ink Art featured work by only two women (Xing Danwen [b 1967] and Duan Jianyu [b 1970]) among the thirty-five artists included.

^[4]    Luise Guest, Half the Sky: Conversations with Women Artists in China, Piper Press, Dawes Point, New South Wales, 2016

^[5]    Laura Vermeeren, Ink Studies: Everyday Practices of Calligraphy in Contemporary China, National University of Singapore Press, Singapore, 2025, pp xxi, p 4, p 6

^[6]    Ibid, p 73, pp 92–95; several works by Wang Dongling notably featured in Ink Art (Hearn, Ink Art, pp 139–141)

^[7]    Guest, Invisible Ink, op cit, p 113, p 116, p 131. Although not included in Hearn’s Ink Art, Bingyi is briefly mentioned in art historian Wu Hung’s catalogue essay: ‘Bingyi (b. 1975) is a relative latecomer to the field [who] creates intimate handscrolls as well as mural-size compositions [that fuse] macroscopic and microscopic visions of the universe with abstract, unceasingly transformative ink images’ (Wu Hung, ‘Transcending the East/West Dichotomy: A Short History of Contemporary Chinese Ink Painting’, in Hearn, Ink Art, op cit, pp 29–30).

^[8]    Guest, Invisible Ink, op cit, p 118; Vermeeren, Ink Studies, op cit, p 92, p 95

^[9]    Vermeeren, Ink Studies, op cit, p 1

^[10]   Guest, Invisible Ink, op cit, p xii, p 5, p 160

^[11]   Vermeeren, Ink Studies, op cit, pp 47–58

^[12]   Ibid, p 68

^[13]   Ibid, pp 44–65

^[14]   Ibid, p 11

^[15]   Ibid, p 12

^[16]   Ibid, pp 130–146

^[17]   Guest, Invisible Ink, op cit, p 58, p 70

^[18]   Ibid, p 63

^[19]   Ibid, p 86

^[20]   Ibid, p xii

^[21]   Ella Shohat, ‘Area Studies, Gender Studies, and the Cartographies of Knowledge’, Social Text, vol 20, no 3, 2002, p 75; for the first iteration of these ideas, see Shohat, ‘Area Studies, Transnationalism, and the Feminist Production of Knowledge’, Signs, vol 26, no 4, 2001, pp 1269–1272

^[22]   Shohat, ‘Area Studies, Gender Studies, and the Cartographies of Knowledge’, op cit, pp 73–74

^[23]   Vermeeren, Ink Studies, op cit, p 158

^[24]   Guest, Invisible Ink, op cit, pp 72–73

^[25]   Vermeeren, Ink Studies, op cit, pp 16–17, p 93, pp 114–115, pp 131–132

^[26]   Guest, Invisible Ink, op cit, p 25, p 37, p 44, p 76

^[27]   Ibid, p 37, p 66, p 98

^[28]   Vermeeren, Ink Studies, op cit, pp 20–11, p 57, pp 85–86

^[29]   Ibid, p xx. Bingyi was born in Beijing, Xiao Lu in Hangzhou, Ma Yanling and Tao Aimin in Hubei Province, and Xie Rong in Chengdu, Sichuan Province.

^[30]   See Vermeeren, Ink Studies, op cit, pp 81–89

^[31]   For further discussion of Liu Kuo-sung, see Aida Yuen Wong, ‘Ink Painting in the Sinophone World: Liu Kuo-sung’s Hong Kong Period’, Art in Translation, vol 11, no 1, 2019, pp 22–44. In 1981, the same year as the founding of the first official Calligraphy Association, Liu notably represented Taiwan and Hong Kong at the inauguration of the Research Institute of Traditional Chinese Painting, also in Beijing. He returned to the city in 1983 for a widely praised solo exhibition of his work at the National Art Museum, which then toured eighteen cities across the country (see ibid, p 31).

^[32]   See Vermeeren, Ink Studies, op cit, p 89, p 91

^[33]   See Guest, Invisible Ink, op cit, p 109. The addition of Hong Kong and Taiwan to the narrative could also have assisted in combating the tendency, as Joan Kee has observed, for works of ink art to be ‘seen as contemporary [only] on the basis of their potential affiliations with conditions, subjects, and questions already reified as contemporary or as fundamental to contemporary art’, thereby ‘obscuring the sociocultural particulars of the context that enabled the artwork’s emergence’ (Joan Kee, ‘The Curious Case of Contemporary Ink Painting’, Art Journal, vol 69, no 3, 2010, p 89, p 94).

^[34]   See, for example, my discussion of works by Charwei Tsai (b 1980) and Hung Keung (b 1970) in ‘Material Chineseness: Ink and Porcelain in Contemporary Art Beyond National Borders’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, vol 21, no 1, 2021, pp 58–74

^[35]   Guest, Invisible Ink, op cit, p 2

^[36]   Shohat, ‘Area Studies, Transnationalism, and the Feminist Production of Knowledge’, op cit, p 1269

^[37]   Guest, Invisible Ink, op cit, p 4, p 109

^[38]   Vermeeren, Ink Studies, op cit, p 39, p 41, p 55

Dr Alex Burchmore is a Senior Lecturer in Art History and Curatorial Studies at the Australian National University, Canberra. His first book, New Export China: Translations Across Time and Place in Contemporary Chinese Porcelain Art (University of California Press, 2023), traces the myriad ways in which Chinese artists, inside and outside China, have used porcelain from the 1990s to the present to shape their visions of personal and cultural identity.