Third Liu Kuo-sung Ink Art Award 2023

After two rounds of judging, the Liu Kuo-sung Foundation and The Ink Society were delighted to announce Zhang Xiaoli the Winner of the Third Liu Kuo-sung Ink Art Award, with a cash prize of HKD100,000. Honorable Mentions were awarded to Ling Pui Sze and Mateo. The award ceremony was held on October 7, 2023 at Fine Art Asia, and the works of the three winners were exhibited at The Ink Society’s Special Exhibition Zone.

Eight previous winners were also invited to the award ceremony to receive award certificates: Bian Kai, Winner of the Second Liu Kuo-sung Ink Art Award, and Tseng Ting-yu and Barbara Choi, Honorable Mentions (all 2021); Hung Fai, Gold Award Winner of the Special Liu Kuo-sung Ink Art Award, Yau Wing-fung and Chan Kwan-lok, Silver Award Winners, and Shum Kwan-yi and Cheuk Ka-wai, Bronze Award Winners (all 2022).

Nominators

Feng Bin (Director, Chongqing Art Museum, Chongqing)

Kao Chien-Hui (Independent curator and art critic, Taipei)

Lin Haizhong (Artist; Deputy Director, Chinese Painting and Calligraphy Connoisseurship Center, China Academy of Art, Hangzhou)

Pi Li (Head of Art, Tai Kwun, Hong Kong)

Qiu Ting (Artist; Professor, China Academy of Art, Beijing)

Judges

Andy Hei (Director, The Ink Society, Hong Kong)

Lin Mu (Researcher, China National Academy of Painting, Beijing)

Liu Kuo-sung (Artist, Taipei)

Tina Pang (Curator of Hong Kong Visual Culture, M+, Hong Kong)

Xie Suzhen (Director, Today Art Museum, Beijing)

Dr Xie Suzhen on Zhang Xiaoli’s Pockets of Seclusion:

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Zhang Xiaoli was born in Guizhou, China in 1989. She entered the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2008, where she received a dual first-class honors degree in Fine Arts and Biology in 2014. In 2021 Zhang was awarded a master’s degree from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, where she is currently pursuing a doctorate.

Using Lego blocks, convenience food containers and women’s handbags to create deconstructed personal landscapes, Zhang Xiaoli marks life’s experiences by regressing them into something greater than their common denominator of tradition. Whispers of dark smoke seem to float across a painting’s surface as though one’s mind were traveling through a landscape, but the landscape itself is trapped within a vessel. Just like modern people f loating in the sea, the intertwining and entanglement of her Fine Arts and Biology majors has not only endowed Zhang with a delicate artistic sensibility, but shot it through with logical thinking, much like a fine embroidered brocade. This combination engenders a desire for tree branches that reach out from a wall to embrace the Moon, even though they are tightly shackled to a graceful piece of porcelain. These are the hidden valleys of seclusion that people yearn for within the hustle and bustle of the contemporary world!

Art can process human emotions better than people. Only those with the talent to give themselves up to art can find this gap, a gap where there is calm and clarity. No longer about following a master’s style or painting from nature, what can be seen in Zhang Xiaoli’s work is beyond the mysteries of spirit resonance and vitality.

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