CHAMPAIGN, IL.- A new exhibition at Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign explores how the more than 1,000-year-old tradition of ink painting has recently been shaped and reinterpreted by artists in Taiwan. The exhibition, Ink Shower: Contemporary Taiwanese Artists Reimagine Tradition, was collaboratively produced by Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois’s Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies, Taiwanese curator Kai-Ching Hsiao, the InART Space gallery in Taiwan, and other advisors and artists.

The exhibition opens with a reception on Nov. 5 and is on view through Feb. 27. A wide range of events will accompany the exhibition, including a Center for Advanced Study MillerComm lecture on Nov. 4 by internationally renowned artist Yao Jui-Chung, whose work is in the exhibition, and an artists panel discussion on Nov. 6.

Hsiao, a doctoral candidate in the department of art history and art criticism at Tainan National University of the Arts in Taiwan, brought together the work of 12 artists, with support from Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture. Their work shows how ink painting as a genre has moved beyond brush, ink and paper to explore common themes across media, said Maureen Warren, Krannert Art Museum’s curator of European and American art who co-curated the exhibition.

“The University of Illinois is especially meaningful for ‘Ink Shower’ because of both its history and its strong environment for Asian studies, interdisciplinary research and cross-cultural exchange,” said Hsiao, who noted that the landmark 1966 exhibition The New Chinese Landscape: Six Contemporary Chinese Artists, which featured artists associated with Taiwan, included a University of Illinois architecture alumnus, Chen Chi-kwan. “Sixty years later, we are bringing artists representing new directions in contemporary Taiwanese ink to Krannert Art Museum. As a university museum connected to a diverse academic community, it offers an ideal setting for these works to enter new conversations across art, history, culture and different ways of seeing.”

Only one of the artists in the exhibition works entirely in traditional ink materials. The rest use photography, sculpture, video, sound, installation, and digital artwork to explore themes of urbanization, environmental destruction, global modernity, and the Taiwanese landscape. Their work is influenced by the political history of Taiwan, Warren said. The country has been under the rule of its Indigenous peoples, the Netherlands, Spain, Japan and China at various times. It also is the home of advanced technological innovations.

“Taiwan is the inheritor of all these different traditions, and now we have a generation of artists who are mixing different aspects of them to create something all their own,” she said. “This artwork gives us some insight to the unique cultural history of Taiwan and what’s shaped their artists’ points of view.”

The artists interpreted ink painting traditions in new ways. For example, shan shui, meaning “mountain water,” is a tradition of paintings depicting imagined natural landscapes, which are informed by Buddhism and Daoism. The artist Chen Chun-Hao (see below) recreates those classical paintings using tens of thousands of stainless steel nails placed at various densities, resulting in a range of tones and a surface that seems to shift and flicker as viewers move from side to side and closer or further away from it. The work references a classical ink painting but in a medium that suggests the rapid industrialization of Taiwan, Warren said.

“There is a really important tradition of copying in ink painting, to try to mimic the brush work and design of a classical master, but more than that, to try to capture the ineffable spirit and uniqueness of their artistic vision,” Warren said.

Artist Chien Yu-Jen recreated the tradition of copying with a series of paintings of Taroko on the east coast of Taiwan — a place of rugged beauty that also is home to mining that supports the concrete industry. He creates images of mountains and gorges using cement, sand, and minerals.

Artist Wu Chi-Tsung created his “Cyano-Collage 276” by coating the rice paper used for ink painting and calligraphy in a cyanotype emulsion, crumpling it and placing it in the sun, slowly unfolding it over the course of a day. The effect is a dramatic image that resembles jagged mountain peaks, underwater terrains or crashing waves, Warren said.

In a folding screen in the exhibition, Yao reimagines traditional landscape painting in a whimsical manner, inserting dinosaurs alongside Tu Di Gong, a deity associated with wealth and prosperity who is beloved in Taiwan. The landscape of Taiwan is thus composed of endless layers, from the high-tech present back through a prehistoric past.

“Ink Shower highlights the enduring power of ink as a medium that infuses contemporary Taiwanese art in exquisite, profound, and surprising ways," Stephanie Smith, director of Krannert Art Museum, noted.

Krannert Art Museum acquired three of the works on view, by Wu and Yao, through the University of Illinois’s John N. Chester endowment fund and the Krannert Art Museum Council’s 2026 Acquired Taste celebration.