First Liu Kuo-sung Ink Art Award 2019

After two rounds of judging, the Liu Kuo-sung Foundation and The Ink Society were delighted to announce Wu Chi-tsung the Winner of the First Liu Kuo-sung Ink Art Award, with a cash prize of HKD100,000. Honorable Mentions were awarded to Hung Fai and Sun Yuan. The award ceremony was held on October 5, 2019 at Ink Asia, and the works of the three winners were exhibited at The Ink Society’s Special Exhibition Zone.

Nominators

Shang Hui (Editor-in-chief, Fine Arts Magazine, Beijing)

Raymond Tang (Curator—Modern and Hong Kong Art, Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong)

Wang Huangsheng (Artist; former Director, of the Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum, Beijing)

Wu Hongliang (Deputy Dean, of the Beijing Fine Art Academy; Director, of the Art Museum of Beijing Fine Art Academy, Beijing)

Philip Wu (Assistant Professor, Department of Fine Arts, Tunghai University, Taichung)

Judges

Liu Kuo-sung (Artist, Taipei)

Lesley Ma (Ink Art Curator, M+, Hong Kong)

Pi Daojian (Independent curator and art critic, Shenzhen)

David Pong Chun Yee (Chairman, The Ink Society, Hong Kong)

Jason Wang (Independent curator and art critic, Taipei)

Jason Wang, on the work of Wu Chi-tsung:

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Wu Chi-tsung, the winner of the First Liu Kuo-sung Ink Art Award, was born in Taipei in 1981. During his studies at Taipei National University of the Arts in the late 1990s and early 2000s, ink painting was on the verge of decline in the Taiwanese art scene. While Wu Chi-tsung primarily explored Western painting and new-media art, he also observed and participated in ink painting. A key characteristic of Wu’s work is his transformation of traditional ink painting and its aesthetics into contemporary expressions, without being confined to the ways of brush and ink. Through various media and imaging technologies, Wu manipulates light and shadow, engaging in an individual and alternative dialogue with ink painting. Before 2012, he began to combine traditional cyanotype printing techniques with xuan paper, developing the Wrinkled Texture series, mounted as hanging scrolls. The xuan paper, coated with a photosensitive agent, undergoes color changes under light exposure, developing from cyan to ochre, and sometimes to white. Wu crumples the coated xuan paper, allowing sunlight to make complex textures and color variations. He then collages in layers to create unique paintings. Since 2016, this technique has matured and the pictorial interest has expanded, becoming the Cyano-collage series. Although the cyan-colored images on xuan paper are highly abstract, Wu’s finished works are evocative of natural landscape, especially Chinese landscape. The work submitted for the final judging is from this series.

Starting from his experimental techniques in new-media art, Wu Chi-tsung has for years maintained a dialogue with the tradition of ink painting, deepening its aesthetics and broadening its scope to achieve a unique contemporary style. This earned him the approval of most of the judges, making him the Winner of the First Liu Kuo-sung Ink Art Award in 2019.

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