DgcityA major research exhibition opened at the Shandong Art Museum in Jinan this week, asking a quietly ambitious question: what can black and white still say in Chinese art? Titled “Xuan Su,” after the classical Chinese words for the dark, mysterious origin of things and the plain, unadorned silk on which ink falls, the show brings together more than 60 works by 12 contemporary artists. It holds its opening ceremony on November 11 and opens to the general public on November 13.
The lineup spans several generations and almost every medium. Among the participants are painters Shang Yang, Yan Ping, Leng Bingchuan and Gu Liming; the calligrapher Wang Dongling; conceptual artist Xu Bing, whose work treats language itself as a material; sculptors Sui Jianguo and Wang Huaiqing; Liang Shaoji, known for sculptures grown over years with silkworms; fiber artist Shi Hui; ceramicist and Tsinghua University professor Bai Ming; and Ma Yansong, the architect behind the MAD practice. Paintings, sculpture, installation, calligraphy, ceramics and architectural form share the same rooms, linked only by a palette reduced to its essentials.
Curator Wu Hongliang, director of the Beijing Fine Art Academy, framed the exhibition around paired ideas long central to Chinese thought: emptiness and substance, yin and yang, heaven and earth. He told the opening audience that the works were chosen not for stylistic consistency but for what each artist brings to those questions through visual form. Rather than a historical survey of ink painting, the exhibition reads black and white as a living language, one that abstract painters, conceptual artists and architects can still use.
The premise reaches deep into the Chinese tradition. Monochrome ink painting, the black strokes on white paper or silk of literati masters, treated line and blank space as equal partners: what was left unpainted could carry as much meaning as what was drawn. That idea runs through calligraphy and landscape painting, and later influenced 20th-century artists who struggled to reconcile ink aesthetics with Western modernism. The Jinan show argues that the same logic survives in sculpture, fabric and even buildings.
Speaking for the participating artists, Bai Ming invoked the late painter Wu Guanzhong’s well-known metaphor of the kite that never loses its string. The 12 artists, he suggested, fly in very different directions, but the line that holds them is a shared Chinese sense of black-and-white beauty. Museum director Yang Xiaogang said the institution aimed to bring research-driven contemporary work to a Shandong audience more often associated, in popular imagination, with the province’s ancient Confucian heritage.
For visitors, the effect is less a march through styles than a test of restraint. Stripped of color, each work has to hold its own through texture, scale and the weight of a mark. The exhibition continues at the Shandong Art Museum after its public opening on Friday, with no closing date announced at the opening event.