The first major exhibition of Chinese contemporary art ever mounted by the Metropolitan, Ink Art explores how contemporary works from a non-Western culture may be displayed in an encyclopedic art museum. Presented in the Museum's permanent galleries for Chinese art, the exhibition features artworks that may best be understood as part of the continuum of China's traditional culture. These works may also be appreciated from the perspective of global art, but by examining them through the lens of Chinese historical artistic paradigms, layers of meaning and cultural significance that might otherwise go unnoticed are revealed. Ultimately, both points of view contribute to a more enriched understanding of these artists' creative processes.

Featuring some seventy works by thirty-five artists in various media—paintings, calligraphy, photographs, woodblock prints, video, and sculpture—created during the past three decades, the exhibition is organized thematically into four parts: The Written Word, New Landscapes, Abstraction, and Beyond the Brush. Although all of the artists have challenged, subverted, or otherwise transformed their sources through new modes of expression, Ink Art seeks to demonstrate that China's ancient pattern of seeking cultural renewal through the reinterpretation of past models remains a viable creative path.

Jie-chang Yang - Yongliang YANG - Dong SONG - Donling Wang - ShanZhuan WU - Huan ZHANG - Bing Xu - Weiwei AI - Wenda GU - Zhijie QIU - Jian Ren - Dan Liu - Guorui Shi - Danwen XING - Lijun FANG - FuDong YANG - AnXiong Qiu - Yu Zhang - Guo-Qiang CAI - Yong-Ping Huang - Jian-Jun Zhang - Jin WANG - Shaoxiong CHEN - Jianyu DUAN - Hao HONG - Yan HUANG - Huasheng Li - Wei LIU - Shi-hua Qui - Fan SHAO - Xun SUN - Tiande Wang - Fanzhi Zeng - Wang ZHAN - Ming-Chip FUNG -
Curator Maxwell K. Hearn -

The Dairy Art Centre is pleased to present ‘Island’, an exhibition bringing together the works of over forty established and emerging international contemporary artists. It is constructed as the unfolding chapters of a novel based on Aldous Huxley’s Island of 1962, utopian story and counterpart to the Brave New World written thirty years earlier.

Inspired by some of the themes of the novel, the exhibition presents a selection of works from the collection of Dairy Art Centre founders, Frank Cohen and Nicolai Frahm, whilst also including loans from the Americas, Asia and Europe, and a dozen new commissions and first-time releases.

New commissions include Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury’s giant mushrooms, a clock work by John Armleder, a new wall painting by U.S. artist Ann Craven, ambiguous material by the Order of the Third Bird, traces of evanescent wall mural by Tom Benson, new works by Ursula Mayer, and Franck Leibovici & Diemo Schwarz.

Stepping into the exhibition the visitor is invited to retrace the steps of Bloomsbury-born Island protagonist Will Farnaby, observer, actor and catalyst, as imagined by the organizers of the exhibition, or to simply meander among singular artistic proposals. 'Island celebrates the polyphonic and singular voices of the participating artists and their works, inviting the exhibition's visitors to join in a shared experience of the here and now.

Weiwei AI - John M Armleder - Sylvie Auvray - Tom Benson - Valentin Carron - Jake & Dinos (*1966 / *1962) Chapman - George Condo - Ann Craven - Thomas Demand - Lijun FANG - Urs Fischer - Théodore Fivel - Sylvie Fleury - [Thomas Poulsen] FOS - Cyprien Gaillard - Gunjan Gupta - Anthea Hamilton - Thilo Heinzmann - Terence Koh - Sergej Jensen - Rashid Johnson - Per Kirkeby - Adriana Lara - [Franck Leibovici *1975 & Diemo Schwarz] Leibovici & Schwarz - Ursula Mayer - Takashi Murakami - Order of the Third Bird - Jagannath Panda - Maï-Thu Perret - Sigmar Polke - Laure Prouvost - R. H. Quaytman - Ugo Rondinone - Sterling Ruby - Tomás Saraceno - Julian Schnabel - Cindy Sherman - Dirk Skreber - Haim Steinbach - Rirkrit Tiravanija - [Jiten Thukral *1976 & Sumir Tagra *1979] Thukral & Tagra - Andro Wekua - Douglas White - Fanzhi Zeng -
Curator Sarina Basta -