Light in The Dark by Wu Yiming

Mind Set Art Center is delighted to present Wu Yiming’s second solo exhibition in Taiwan, “Light in the Dark”, from 13th of May to 24th of June 2017. Working with Chinese ink, Wu Yiming’s latest solo show unfolds landscapes from his everyday surroundings in the city of Shanghai, as well as those he encountered in journeys around the world. Light floats in unusual manners across the scenes, carrying spiritual insights which were extracted, refined and developed from the artist’s personal experiences with his unique perception of the world.

Wu highly praises the past accomplishments in both fields of Chinese ink painting and Western art, but does not intend to follow the masters’ paths. Consciously avoiding the symbolic system and standards of the tradition, he has developed an experimental yet cultural-rich manner to work with ink painting, allowing him to pursuit art from a more personal and contemporary perspective. In recent works, Wu depicts ordinary scenes in an unusual manner that is astray from the accustomed way of seeing. In Ghiffa Town in Italy, for instance, he painted the sky, mountain and trees in the background with blue to frame the architectural structure in the foreground, which was left blank. Thus the substance is represented with the void, and light and shade play magically, forming a spiritual scene. In Tao Huachong, Ying Shan, Hu Bei, the solid iron gate is again represented with void. Light and color dance over the scene to reveal unspeakable emotions behind the material reality.

Italian critic Monica Dematté has stated, “In Wu’s painting, emptiness could be in white as how it is expressed traditionally, but also could be in black. The light illuminating and being absorbed by all things during the day can only become accurate vision or a beam of light in the dark, replacing the appearance of the reality with understanding of the whole.” Wu is creating a new chapter of Chinese ink painting with his contemporary yet personal viewpoint. His practice with blank is outstanding especially in recent works, in which the blank is not only considered like “Qiyun” as in traditional Chinese painting, but further represents a new point of view and becomes an artistic concept.