Exhibition | Ink Shower: Contemporary Taiwanese Artists Reimagine Tradition

For more than a thousand years, ink painting has been a venerable practice, conveying people’s deepest beliefs and highest aspirations. Ink art has expressed complex, evolving ideas about aesthetics, spirituality, and the nature of the human condition. In today’s world, the range of visual and cultural concerns at the heart of ink art—developed into a major artistic tradition in China during the Tang dynasty (618–907)—now informs a wide range of art, including painting, sculpture, video, photography, animation, and more.

Ink Shower focuses on dynamic works of art in this vein produced by twelve Taiwanese artists. While the cultural fabric of Taiwan has been shaped by waves of colonialism, modernization, and globalization, the tradition of ink art in Taiwan has never been a mere continuation of history. Instead, it has evolved through a process of cultural bricolage—appropriating and transforming elements to create new meanings.

Rooted in the genealogy of Chinese ink traditions, ink art in Taiwan has been deeply intertwined with local artistic developments since the mid-twentieth century. Over time, the singular path of “ink as tradition” has been gradually dismantled through movements such as modern ink painting, nativist realism, and conceptual art. Taiwanese artists have come to regard ink not merely as a medium, but as a conceptual device and cultural signifier—shifting from medium to spirit, and from spirit to a renewed engagement with diverse media. Ink Shower does not assert a direct narrative. Rather, it adopts an oblique, mobile, and peripheral strategy—entering from the margins, unfolding from dim light, and transforming “ink” into a cultural tool for understanding identity, reimagining history, and envisioning the future.

Situating “ink” as a mixture of aesthetic and cultural concerns rather than simply a medium, the exhibition incorporates a range of media to celebrate several distinctively Taiwanese contributions to this enduring and malleable tradition.

Featured artists include Agi Chen, Chen Chun-Hao, Cheng Chung-Hsiao, Chien Yu-Jen, Hua Chien-Chiang, Lee An-Cheng, Lee Ming-Tse, Lin Chun-Pin, Lin Chun-Ting, Wu Chi-Tsung, Wu Tsan-Cheng, and Yao Jui-Chung.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Agi Chen (陳怡潔) re-encodes popular culture, animation imagery, and digital color through painting, video, and projection mapping, transforming mass visual experience and contemporary perception.

Chen Chun-Hao (陳浚豪) recreates classical painting with mosquito nails, thumbtacks, and industrial materials, transforming brushwork, texture strokes, and qi into metallic points and repetitive bodily labor.

Cheng Chung-Hsiao (鄭崇孝) uses the Pouty Boy as a pictorial persona, combining cartoon color, humor, and art-historical remixing to bring classical landscape and canonical painting into contemporary contexts.

Chien Yu-Jen (簡佑任) reconstructs landscape screens with cement, sand, minerals, ink, and found objects, drawing on mountaineering experience and material experimentation to consider nature and modernization.

Hua Chien-Chiang (華建強) combines nihonga, ink, and acrylic with vivid color, imagined imagery, and decorative composition, creating landscapes between tradition, comic sensibility, and contemporary fable.

Lee An-Cheng (李安成) uses ink washes, brushy textures, and weighty blacks and whites to form psychic landscapes between figuration and abstraction, transforming land, perception, and inner spirit into a solitary ink language.

Lee Ming-Tse (李明則) works with comic-like lines, folk imagery, martial arts memories, and vernacular narratives to create a pictorial world shaped by literati taste, local color, and fantastical storytelling.

Lin Chun-Pin (林俊彬) uses Gundam model parts as sculptural material, turning pop-cultural commodities into three-dimensional landscapes and assembled terrains that reflect on readymades, reproduction, and artistic value.

Lin Chun-Ting (林俊廷) explores new media, interactive video, and sound installation, combining technology, humanistic thought, and classical imagery to turn images into dynamic spaces of perception.

Wu Chi-Tsung (吳季璁) works across photography, video, installation, and painting, often using light, time, and everyday materials to reconstruct landscape texture strokes through poetic media experiments.

Wu Tsan-Cheng (吳燦政) centers his practice on field recordings, environmental soundscapes, and online mapping, using sound as a medium for sensing land, cities, and changes in time.

Yao Jui-Chung (姚瑞中) works across photography, painting, installation, performance, and publishing, often using humor, appropriation, and critique to address history, ruins, power, and the imagination of landscape.

Curated by Kai-Ching Hsiao, PhD Candidate, Department of Art History and Art Criticism, Tainan National University of the Arts, and Maureen Warren, Curator of European and American Art, Krannert Art Museum. 

Produced in collaboration with the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Illinois, with special thanks to Director Matt Winters and Associate Director Yuchia Chang. 

Ink Shower is organized by InART Space and Krannert Art Museum. Advised by Jamie Tu, Rita Chang, Chien-Hui Kao, Yu-Chia Chang. 

Made possible with grant support from the Ministry of Culture, Taiwan; Center for Advanced Study MillerComm Lecture Series; and Illinois Arts Council. Additional funding is provided by the J. Fred and Donna Giertz Exhibition Support Fund.

Contact kam-accessibility@illinois.edu with any questions or to request accommodations for a variety of accessibility supports.

Parking nearby is free after 5 pm and on weekends.

Related Events:

• MillerComm Lecture Series | Landscape as Storytelling: The Journey of "Yao’s Black Divine Comedy" (November 4, 2026, 4 pm Reception/5 pm Lecture, Levis Faculty Center Room 210)
• Opening Reception | Ink Shower: Contemporary Taiwanese Artists Reimagine Tradition (November 5, 2026, 5-7 pm, Krannert Art Museum)
• Artists Panel Discussion | Ink Shower: Contemporary Taiwanese Artists Reimagine Tradition (Nov 06, 2026 - 2–3:30pm, Temple Buell Hall, Plym Auditorium)
• Curator Talk & Tour | Ink Shower (November 7, 2026, 10:30-11:30 am, Krannert Art Museum)