Bingyi breakthrough art are fantastic examples of ink painting
The art of Bingyi capture movement of water, accumulation of sediment and the flow of wind
Taihang Rhapsody, 2022-2023, Bingyi, Ink on paper
Bingyi art is a visual challenge
Walking into a Chinese ink painting exhibition, especially one by Bingyi, offers a peculiar challenge.
The experience demands something different from the straightforward viewing habits trained into visitors by centuries of Western art. A painting that initially appears as muted greys and blacks, spare brushstrokes and expansive white paper, asks the viewer to abandon the notion that detail and realism equal quality.
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The painter Guo Xi, working during the Northern Song period (960-1279) nearly a thousand years ago, offered guidance that remains vital: “When one regards the object from a certain distance, it is imposing; when one regards it close up, its essence is revealed.” This simple instruction encapsulates why ink painting operates on a fundamentally different frequency than many art traditions.
Origin of Life, 2022-2025, Bingyi, Ink on paper
The exhibition Taihang Rhapsody at Asia Society Hong Kong Center showcases the monumental works of Bingyi, a contemporary artist whose practice inherits and radically reimagines centuries of tradition. To understand her work demands stepping back from familiar aesthetic assumptions and learning the language of ink, water, and paper that has governed Chinese art since the Tang dynasty (618-907).
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Chinese ink painting emerged as a distinct tradition during the Tang dynasty, evolving gradually from earlier, more colourful approaches. Unlike Western painting, which pursued realistic representation through technique, Chinese painters developed a philosophy treating paint not as a mirror of the visible world but as a medium for expressing inner states.
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The earliest recorded theorist, Xie He, a sixth-century theorist, established the Six Principles of painting, emphasising that capturing the essence or spirit of a subject mattered more than mere likeness. By the eighth century, the poet-painter Wang Wei pioneered monochrome ink painting, deliberately abandoning colour to pursue what he termed the universal principles underlying visible reality.
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This shift reflected a deeper philosophical reorientation. Rather than seeing the world as a collection of separate objects to be depicted, Chinese thinkers influenced by both Daoism and Buddhism understood reality as a flow of interconnected forces. Water represented the life force that moves through all things. Mountains embodied stability and permanence. The painter’s task involved capturing not surfaces but the energy animating them, a concept later termed chi.
Installation view at Asia Society Hong Kong Center, Bingyi
The Northern Song period witnessed unprecedented achievement in landscape painting. Masters such as Fan Kuan and Guo Xi created compositions of staggering scale and ambition. Fan Kuan’s monumental work Travelers Among Mountains and Streams, rendered on silk nearly seven feet in height, transformed painting into something approaching architecture in its spatial complexity.
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The painting did not depict a specific place but rather embodied the artist’s philosophy of cosmic order. Mountains filled the composition, rendered through meticulous brushwork and layered ink washes, while human figures appeared almost incidental, dwarfed by the vastness surrounding them. This proportional relationship expresses a philosophical idea: individuals exist within a natural order far greater than themselves, yet this relationship holds harmony rather than diminishment.
Song painters achieved monumental effects through labour
Northern Song painters achieved their monumental effects through extraordinary labour. They prepared dozens of preliminary sketches, executed multiple drafts, created tracing copies, and carefully corrected compositions before committing to the expensive silk that would receive their final vision.
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The result concealed rather than revealed the effort. Viewers confronted not heroic brushwork but unified compositions of such clarity and coherence that the individual strokes seemed to dissolve into the overall image. Jing Hao (c.855-915), a landscape painter and art theorist, codified the philosophical and technical principles that became textbooks for Northern Song artists. His first principle was that the brush should remain invisible.
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Following the Mongol conquest in 1279, the subsequent Yuan dynasty (1279-1368) witnessed a philosophical and aesthetic shift. Scholar-painters, refusing to serve the Mongol rulers, retreated to the countryside and developed a radically different approach.
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Where Song painters had emphasised imperial patronage and monumental scale, Yuan artists pursued personal expression and intimate formats. They inscribed their paintings with poems. They made their brushwork visible. The style came to be called xieyi, meaning sketching ideas and representing spontaneous, expressive rendering prioritising emotional truth over formal precision.
Moon Flower, 2024-2025, Ink on paper (left), and Wintry Forest, 2021-2024 (right)
These literati painters argued that painting functioned as an extension of one’s inner life, much like calligraphy or poetry. The Four Great Masters of the Yuan period, Huang Gongwang, Wu Zhen, Ni Zan, and Wang Meng, developed distinctive personal styles, each recognisable by their particular brushwork and compositional preferences.
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Yuan painting embraced asymmetry, empty space, and suggestion over statement. A few strokes might indicate an entire mountain. A blank expanse of paper became as important as inked areas, suggesting mist, distance, or the unknowable.
Two competing philosophies about purpose
These two traditions, Song monumentality and Yuan expression, represented competing philosophies about painting’s purpose. Song artists sought to capture universal principles through controlled, meticulous technique.
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Yuan artists pursued personal revelation through spontaneity. Both emphasised hiding traces of labour, though through opposite means: Song through subordinating brushwork to composition, Yuan through making brushwork seem effortless rather than controlled.
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Understanding these traditions requires grasping a concept with no direct Western equivalent: yi-xiang. The term combines two ideas. Yi refers to anything rooted in consciousness: an emotion, memory, thought, or inspired feeling. Xiang means image. Together, yi-xiang describes the creation of images that communicate inner experiences to others. A painter does not record objective reality but rather uses visual form to transmit something felt or understood.
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This framework transforms the relationship between artist and viewer. Rather than the artist presenting superior wisdom to passive observers, both participants become equal partners. The painter creates an image expressing their inner experience. The viewer, possessing their own consciousness and heart, encounters that image and generates their own inner experience in response. The painting serves as a bridge between two separate consciousnesses.
Birds in the Paradise, 2022-2025, Bingyi, Ink on paper
This philosophical position found grounding in the concept of chi, often translated as energy or vitality. In Chinese philosophy, chi permeates the universe and all living things.
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Referring back to Jing Hao’s theories, the artist’s task was to transform universal chi, drawn from their own body, into the chi of the completed painting. Through the brush, the artist channelled cosmic energy, and viewers encountering the finished work would feel that energy flowing through their own bodies.
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This philosophy finds its material reality in ink’s behaviour. Ink consists primarily of water mixed with soot: finely ground carbon derived from burning pine or oil. Soot, being carbon, absorbs light absolutely. Water, conversely, transmits light, remaining semi-transparent.
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When a drop of ink falls into water, the movement of soot through the water suddenly becomes visible. Yet within minutes, the ink diffuses throughout the water, returning to invisibility. Paper interrupts this process. When paper absorbs the mixture, it captures a permanent record of movement: a trace of the water’s dance recorded by the soot particles.
Trees by Hua, 2022 Ink on paper (left), and Pine Tree in Deep Mountains, 2019-2023, Ink on paper (right)
The painter’s work involves orchestrating these interactions. Applying ink to dry paper yields one effect. Moistening the paper first creates another. Layering ink over partially dried layers produces different results again. The artist does not so much create the painting as facilitate an encounter between materials, each following its own nature. This explains why Chinese painters speak of working with water rather than merely applying it.
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Bingyi, born in Beijing in 1975, holds a doctorate in art history from Yale and spent years researching ancient painting before beginning her own practice. Her monumental works engage directly with the poured ink tradition stretching back to the Tang dynasty.
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In that era, painters such as Wang Mo and Gu Kuang employed splashing techniques, considered revolutionary and somewhat disreputable by traditionalists. The spontaneous method seemed to contradict the controlled precision valued in literati circles. Yet these practitioners understood their approach as mimicking divine creation itself: letting natural forces generate form rather than imposing human will.
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Bingyi extended this concept by working at landscape scale. She carries enormous sheets of paper to mountainsides and spreads them across the terrain. She applies ink, then allows rain, wind, sun, and passing time to shape the work.
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Then, in her studio, over months or years, she returns repeatedly, adding ink layers, responding to what previous weather cycles created, gradually drawing out images her poetic sensibility perceives emerging from the chaos. She is neither fully controlling nor entirely surrendering but rather conversing with nature through materials and patience.
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This practice realises ideals articulated centuries before. Where Yuan dynasty painters had emphasised personal expression while working indoors, Bingyi eliminates the boundary between studio and landscape.
Her method celebrates harmony and natural processes
Where Daoist philosophy had celebrated harmony with natural processes, her method literally incorporates those processes. The artist becomes present not as a dominating consciousness imposing form but as a consciousness dialoguing with forces larger than herself.
Birds in the Paradise, 2022-2025, Bingyi, Ink on paper
Entering this exhibition requires adopting a different viewing practice. Rather than standing at a comfortable distance and absorbing a completed image, viewers should move through multiple scales of engagement. Step back to perceive overall composition and spatial relationships. Move close enough to observe how ink interacts with paper fibres, how water soaks and spreads, how layers accumulate. Notice where brushwork remains visible and where it dissolves. Pay attention to the subtle variations in black, the different tones of grey.
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Most importantly, resist the urge to identify recognisable objects. Bingyi’s paintings are not landscapes in the representational sense. Instead, they record forces: the movement of water, the accumulation of sediment, the flow of wind. They capture what remains, usually invisible. In this, they realise what Jing Hao identified over a thousand years ago: the painter’s responsibility involves conveying energy itself, the chi that animates all existence.
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The exhibition ultimately demonstrates that ink painting persists not as historical practice but as living tradition. Bingyi’s work proves that the philosophical and technical vocabularies developed over centuries remain vital, capable of addressing contemporary concerns about humanity’s relationship with nature and the possibilities of artistic creation in an age of mechanical reproduction.
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By engaging with this tradition, viewers access a way of seeing that privileges inner experience, embodied sensation, and the profound beauty of materials responding to time and natural forces.
Text and photos Martin Wray
