Ink
Shower
Contemporary Taiwanese Artists Reimagine Tradition
Explore the exhibition ↓
About the
exhibition
Ink Shower: Contemporary Taiwanese Artists Reimagine Tradition on view through Feb 27, 2027
After sixty years of experimentation, Taiwanese artists no longer need to use the traditional materials of brush, paper, ink to engage with the aesthetics and meanings associated with ink painting.
Paintings, photographs, installations, and works in mixed or digital media by twelve mid-career artists demonstrate the outgrowth of this tradition. Now, it is no longer simply a technique, but rather a broader way of seeing and thinking: the visual language of landscape, spatial consciousness, embodied experience, cultural memory, and spirituality. These elements are reinterpreted through contemporary materials, technologies, and lived experience.
In Chinese, Ink Shower or Chu Mo (出墨) has a double meaning: to emerge from ink, and to move beyond the established framework of ink painting. In English, Ink Shower, evokes ink flowing, scattering, and dispersing beyond the paper’s surface. In this sense, “ink” becomes less a material than a cultural language, which is capable of taking on new forms. Rather than asking how tradition can be preserved, Ink Shower considers how established artforms continue to unfold in the present. Drawing from Taiwan’s historical, environmental, and cultural experience, these artists transform brushwork and landscape from inherited forms into living vocabularies—open to reconstruction, reinterpretation, and new ways of imagining the contemporary world.
Participating Artists
Lee An-Cheng
Wu Chi-Tsung
Chen Chun-Hao
Yao Jui-Chung
Agi Chen
Hua Chien-Chiang
Cheng Chung-Hsiao
Lin Chun-Pin
Lin Chun-Ting
Lee Ming-Tse
Wu Tsan-Cheng
Chien Yu-Jen
Curators
Kai-Ching Hsiao
Maureen Warren
Organized by
InART Space
Krannert Art Museum
Exhibition Advisors
Jamie Tu
Rita Chang
Chien-Hui Kao
Yuchia Chang
Produced in Collaboration with
Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Special Thanks
Matt Winters
Yuchia Chang
Grant Support
Ministry of Culture, Taiwan
Center for Advanced Study MillerComm Lecture Series, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Illinois Arts Council
Additional Funding
J. Fred and Donna Giertz Exhibition Support Fund
Across media,
across traditions.
About the artists
Agi Chen (陳怡潔) re-encodes popular culture, animation imagery, and digital color through painting, video, and projection mapping, transforming mass visual experience and contemporary perception.
Chen Chun-Hao (陳浚豪) recreates classical painting with mosquito nails, thumbtacks, and industrial materials, transforming brushwork, texture strokes, and qi into metallic points and repetitive bodily labor.
Cheng Chung-Hsiao (鄭崇孝) uses the Pouty Boy as a pictorial persona, combining cartoon color, humor, and art-historical remixing to bring classical landscape and canonical painting into contemporary contexts.
Chien Yu-Jen (簡佑任) reconstructs landscape screens with cement, sand, minerals, ink, and found objects, drawing on mountaineering experience and material experimentation to consider nature and modernization.
Hua Chien-Chiang (華建強) combines nihonga, ink, and acrylic with vivid color, imagined imagery, and decorative composition, creating landscapes between tradition, comic sensibility, and contemporary fable.
Lee An-Cheng (李安成) uses ink washes, brushy textures, and weighty blacks and whites to form psychic landscapes between figuration and abstraction, transforming land, perception, and inner spirit into a solitary ink language.
Lee Ming-Tse (李明則) works with comic-like lines, folk imagery, martial arts memories, and vernacular narratives to create a pictorial world shaped by literati taste, local color, and fantastical storytelling.
Lin Chun-Pin (林俊彬) uses Gundam model parts as sculptural material, turning pop-cultural commodities into three-dimensional landscapes and assembled terrains that reflect on readymades, reproduction, and artistic value.
Lin Chun-Ting (林俊廷) explores new media, interactive video, and sound installation, combining technology, humanistic thought, and classical imagery to turn images into dynamic spaces of perception.
Wu Chi-Tsung (吳季璁) works across photography, video, installation, and painting, often using light, time, and everyday materials to reconstruct landscape texture strokes through poetic media experiments.
Wu Tsan-Cheng (吳燦政) centers his practice on field recordings, environmental soundscapes, and online mapping, using sound as a medium for sensing land, cities, and changes in time.
Yao Jui-Chung (姚瑞中) works across photography, painting, installation, performance, and publishing, often using humor, appropriation, and critique to address history, ruins, power, and the imagination of landscape.
Exhibition & programs
Exhibition
View on Krannert Art Museum ↗Yao Jui Chung
View on Krannert Art Museum ↗Artists Discussion
View on Krannert Art Museum ↗Opening Reception
View on Krannert Art Museum ↗Curator's Concept
View on Krannert Art Museum ↗Partners & support
Curated by Kai-Ching Hsiao, PhD Candidate, Department of Art History and Art Criticism, Tainan National University of the Arts, and Maureen Warren, Curator of European and American Art, Krannert Art Museum.
Produced in collaboration with the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Illinois, with special thanks to Director Matt Winters and Associate Director Yuchia Chang.
Ink Shower is organized by InART Space and Krannert Art Museum. Advised by Jamie Tu, Rita Chang, Chien-Hui Kao, Yu-Chia Chang.
Made possible with grant support from the Ministry of Culture, Taiwan; Center for Advanced Study MillerComm Lecture Series; and Illinois Arts Council. Additional funding is provided by the J. Fred and Donna Giertz Exhibition Support Fund.