HONG BO: WALKING BETWEEN INK AND BLUE-GREEN

On February 24, 2024, the “Hong Bo: Walking Between Ink and Blue-Green” art exhibition (Shenzhen Stop) was launched at the Shenzhen Art Museum (New Hall). This is the third stop of Hong Bo’s national touring exhibition, following the Guilin and Tianjin stops last year.

Hong Bo, a renowned Chinese-American painter from Shenzhen, stands firmly in the tradition of Chinese painting while innovating on it. His successful practice of “using Chinese painting to depict American landscapes” has earned him recognition in the art world. He created the “Accumulating Color Technique,” blending ink and color in an abstract language to express contemporary spirit. In recent years, he has begun exploring installations and collages rooted in Chinese elements and Eastern aesthetics, expanding the expressive power and aesthetic space of Chinese painting. He has become a highly regarded contemporary artist on the international art scene.

Shenzhen is not only the starting point of Hong Bo’s journey to the world, but also his creative base to which he often returns. As an important exhibition after the opening of the new Shenzhen Art Museum, this show is given significant attention by the artist. Building upon the foundation of the previous two stops, the exhibition features large new works created specifically for this venue, integrating the exhibition space and layout concept. Through two major sections, three galleries, and meticulous design, it presents a three-dimensional trajectory of a contemporary artist’s thought and creation, reflecting the philosophical thinking of a globally traveling Chinese artist on Chinese traditional culture. As such, the exhibition is rich in academic value, archival importance, and experimental spirit.

The “Being and Non-being — Painting Hall” showcases Hong Bo’s modern ink works created in the last two years. The artist breaks through the limitations of traditional landscape painting techniques with large-scale works, intertwining color and ink in a new artistic language that transforms natural landscape impressions into contemporary visual experiences. In the space between presence and absence, the artist uses brushstrokes full of passion to express imagined landscapes.

The “Seeing Blue-Green Again — Installation Hall” exhibits the installation work “Seeing Blue-Green Again No. 9.” The “Seeing Blue-Green” series represents Hong Bo’s recent explorations. The artist attempts to reexamine the contemporary value of Eastern aesthetics with a global perspective, using new media experiments to explore multiple possibilities of traditional artistic expression and create a cross-disciplinary exchange through a fresh visual presentation. “Seeing Blue-Green Again No. 9” is a custom-made installation for the Shenzhen Art Museum and is the largest work in this series.

The “Seeing Blue-Green Again — Collage Hall” displays the collage series “Yi Guantu.” After traveling to famous mountains and rivers worldwide and over forty years of landscape painting practice, the artist projects his deep thoughts onto the chaos of the universe, returning to the most natural and essential aspects of the world: rocks and land, lakes and rivers, compression and conflict, motion and energy… Everything corresponds to the yin-yang and five elements, which becomes the subject of the artist’s expression. The five large-scale collage works create an overwhelming sense, triggering the audience to reflect on the relationship between humans and nature.

The curator of this exhibition, renowned art critic Chen Lusheng, commented: “Hong Bo’s green landscape installations represent a new form of landscape expression. Whether in collage, installation, or ink on paper, they reveal the multiple possibilities of Chinese landscape painting in the 21st century. Through these landscapes, collages, and installations, Hong Bo allows people to see the vitality of Chinese culture in the development of modern society. He encourages reflection on certain mutations in the process of cultural inheritance, which may enrich its essence, or deepen the contemporary connotation and development of Chinese landscape painting with new content.”

This exhibition is organized by the Shenzhen Art Museum and Guilin Art Museum, co-organized by the Tianjin Art Museum, Xingtan Art Museum, and China Vision Art. The exhibition is expected to run until March 26, with a duration of one month.