Roundtable Discussion: Contemporary Chinese Ink Painting & the Persistence of Daoism

This round table discussion, which takes place in association with the SOAS Gallery exhibition ‘Strange Wonders - Dreams, Desire and Daoism: Jizi and Other Pioneers of Contemporary Ink Painting from China’, will explore the relationship between Daoism and ink painting in contemporary China. Since the compilation of its founding text, the Daodejing in the 4th century BCE, Daoism has provided an intellectual focus for resistance to state and other forms of social control as well as the calming achievement of neixin (heart - innermost being) in the face of worldly conflicts and suffering. Examples of these include the classic Daoist text the Zhuangzi (c. 3rd century BCE), wherein the principle of wu-wei (effortless action) is upheld as a corrective to overly legalistic imperial authority, and the so-called Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, who in the 3rd century CE resiled from public service at a time of major political upheaval in China to engage in the contemplation of Daoist teachings and related cultural activities, including painting, poetry writing, calligraphy and music-making, sometimes under the boundary blurring influence of alcoholic intoxication.

The roundtable will discuss the continuing relationship between Daoism and Chinese ink painting and its implications for cultural resistances to authority, individualism, transcendent spirituality, care for the self and respect for nature in an authoritarian-materialist post-revolutionary China now officially aligned with Confucian-related aspirations toward social harmony. Also discussed will be the situating of contemporary Chinese ink art as part of the now conspicuously pluriversal conditions of early 21st–century contemporaneity downstream of post-Cold War globalization. The extent to which the relationship between Daoism and ink painting can indeed be talked or written about will be addressed given Daoism’s ultimate recourse to ineffable feeling rather than cognition as a way of gaining insight into the ontology of the cosmos.

Participants in the roundtable include its moderator Prof. Paul Gladston, the UNSW Judith Neilson Chair of Contemporary Art, Dr. Katie Hill of Sotheby's Institute of Art, London and the curator of ‘Strange Wonders - Dreams, Desire and Daoism - Jizi and Other Pioneers of Contemporary Ink Painting from China’, and Prof. Wang Chunchen of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing who is the son of the artist Jizi, also known as Wang Yunshan [1941 – 2015].

An opening presentation by the moderator and discussion among the participants will be followed by an audience Q&A.

Professor Paul Gladston (moderator) is the inaugural Judith Neilson Chair Professor of Contemporary Art, University of New South Wales, Sydney and a Distinguished Affiliate Fellow of the UK-China Humanities Alliance, Tsinghau University, Beijing. His numerous book-length publications include the monographs Contemporary Chinese Art: A Critical History (2014) - awarded ‘best publication’ at the Awards of Art China (2015) - and Contemporary Chinese Art, Aesthetic Modernity and Zhang Peili: Towards a Critical Contemporaneity (2019) as well as the co-edited collections Visual Culture Wars at the Borders of Contemporary China: Art, Design, Film, New Media and the Prospects of “Post-West” Contemporaneity (2021) and Rethinking Displays of Chinese Contemporary Art: Diversity and Tradition (2024). He was an academic advisor to the internationally acclaimed exhibition ‘Art of Change: New Directions from China,’ Hayward Gallery-South Bank Centre, London (2012).

Professor Wang Chunchen is the Deputy Director and Chief Curator at CAFA Art Museum, Beijing. He was the adjunct curator at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University (2012-2016) and appointed as the curator of the Chinese Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013). He is Editor-in-Chief of The Chinese Contemporary Art Series published by Springer-Verlag, Germany. His art essays: Art Intervenes in Society-A New Artistic Relationship (a Chinese Contemporary Art Criticism Award book, 2010), The Democracy of Art (2013) and The Politics of Images (2013). He has also organized numerous exhibitions, most recently IN THINKING - The Intellectual History and Methodologies of Chinese Contemporary Art, Guangdong (2020).

Dr. Katie Hill is currently Academic Lead, Asia and Senior Lecturer at Sotheby's Institute of Art, London, where she founded and directed the MA in Modern and Contemporary Asian Art.