First post

I've never blogged, but Christine Kuan, Chief Curator of Artsy, invited me to give it a whirl. I met her when I wrote entries on Chinese artists for Grove, the Oxford University Press online art reference.

I'll be blogging mostly about Chinese contemporary art, particularly ink art. The two projects using up most of my bandwidth at the moment are a film series and book, "The Enduring Passion for Ink," and Ink Studio, a new gallery in Beijing where I am Artistic Director. We're doing four shows a year. There will be a major book published in conjunction with each show, to be distributed by DAP.

The Artsy Genome Project is particularly intriguing to me because I have just finished editing the first Ink Studio book, about the artist Zheng Chongbin. I see that his influences range particularly widely, more so than those of many artists I currently see on the Art Genome site.  Perhaps Chinese artists of his generation have given serious consideration to a particularly broad swath of art history! Zheng's sources range from 10th century Chinese landscapes to Caravaggio to Francis Bacon, the Abstract Expressionists, Richard Serra, etc etc.