BRUSSELS.- The Ink Art Week Brussels 2019 (Semaine de l’Encre - 布鲁塞尔水墨周), to be held from May 6 to 12, combines conferences and workshops in the field of Chinese contemporary ink art held at the Faculty of Architecture, La Cambre Horta ULB, in Auditoire Victor Bourgeois and Espace Architecture, in place Flagey.
This week of theoretical and practical events introduces the quest for abstraction in Chinese calligraphy and painting to the Belgian public, offering the opportunity of direct contacts between the public and invited artists and scholars. After a first edition in Venice, Italy, this is the second edition of a travelling event that functions as a collaborative enterprise between ink artists, curators and academic or cultural institutions in the host country.
“Paysage écrit/Ecriture peinte”, a collective exhibition of ink artists combining contemporary calligraphy and landscape painting, will be held in Espace Architecture from May 6 to 30, 2019. The show gathers Chinese calligraphers or painters and artists from all origins that work with ink and paper as main media, engage in decoding and writing the landscape, construct calligraphic geometries or experiment with language and gesture. A progressive investigation looks at how contemporary literati or letter artists departed from traditional artistic practices to explore the ways of modern abstraction. The exhibition unfolds in two parts, one devoted to nature and the other to culture, based on the basics of Chinese landscape painting: that a landscape is not to be seen or painted, but read or written. The versatility of nature, mountains and rivers allows us to encompass in this itinerary a range of experiments dealing with the materiality, tools and gesture of writing, the limits of readability or perception, and geometries of ink and water.
Four satellite exhibitions partner with the Ink Art Week: the art residency ODRADEK, with a collective show curated by Simone Schuiten and Kiran Katara on ink and intercultural dialogue between practitioners of ink on paper East and West, the Garage Cosmos foundation, with a solo exhibit curated by Rosalie Fabre dedicated to Chinese artist Qu Leilei, the collective ArtWeCare, with a show curated by Anne-Catherine Kenis centered on the materiality of writing, dreamstones and cartography, as well as the Chinese galleries of the Royal Museum of Art and History with Lithic Impressions, a display focused on rubbings, a technique of replication from stone carvings to ink on paper.
