Ink History
Chen Shaoxiong
陈劭雄
Production date
2008-2010
Object Detail
Media
animation (black and white, sound)
Measurements
3 min
Notes
Ink History, Chen Shaoxiong’s animated compilation of more than one hundred and fifty ink paintings, references the most iconic photographs in the story of modern China. Developing from earlier works that expanded the possibilities of ink drawing as a time-based medium, and completed after the artist’s move to Beijing from his southern hometown in 2009, Ink History acknowledges the impossibility of summarising the past through key images. It’s as if we are looking at history through the wrong end of a telescope — a distant view of rapidly sequenced and seemingly unconnected events. With deft sweeping strokes in 150 separate drawings, Chen Shaoxiong replicated famous photographs dating from the fall of the Qing Dynasty to the present day. To a soundtrack of rousing speeches and revolutionary songs, undercut by an ominously ticking clock, we see the photographic record of a century: dynastic collapse; the Japanese occupation; the Long March and the victory of Communist troops; a victorious Mao Zedong announcing the People’s Republic of China; Mao with Stalin, and with western leaders; brutalised ‘rightists’ and intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution; a heroic Lei Feng; and onwards to 1989 and the tank man in Tiananmen Square. Each picture, sourced from the internet, is reproduced with fluidly economical marks of ink and wash. They function as ‘key points of reference in the consciousness of our time,’ said the artist, who was inspired by stories told by his centenarian grandmother of her life through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Watching Ink History is an immersive yet profoundly uncomfortable experience: it flashes by in just over three minutes, like a scroll being unrolled quickly.
Accession number
2013.069