Romantic Rhythm: A Cindy Ng Solo Exhibition

 

I have known Cindy Ng for many years, but when it came time to write something for her, I wasn’t sure where to begin. Several scholars have already written essays on her work, so everything wonderful that can be said has already been said. As a neighbor and colleague, I will attempt to share how I see Cindy and her work.  

 

Raised in Macau, Cindy became interested in art at an early age. She also had the opportunity to refine her eye studying important Chinese paintings in the British Museum’s Chinese Painting Study Room. After living in Taipei for about a decade, she moved to Beijing. She has ties to Macau, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Europe, which, in my view, makes her a citizen of the world. Her international experience and perspective means that she is not restricted to a single artistic method or to a traditional range of techniques. However, the spirit of ink is rooted in every Chinese person, and the Romantic Rhythm series is the culmination of Cindy’s unrelenting efforts to pursue the moods and rhythms at the core of Chinese art. 

In pre-Qin folk songs, the Chinese character hui (1) meant “the whirling of water,” but it also implied the peak of perfection, which echoes Cindy’s pursuit of excellence in her work.
 
After a national archivist in ancient times realized that “the law of the Dao is its being what it is” (2), the ultimate pursuit of the painters of the past was “taking the exterior from nature and the interior from the heart.” (3) Thus, Cindy’s work attempts to understand heaven and earth through humanity. As the Ming dynasty faded into the Qing, Shi Tao advocated “the one stroke method,” which was “a method born of no method,” (4) but it took several hundred years before Wu Guanzhong said that “brush and ink equal zero.” In the internet era, “brush and ink follow technology,” and in that context, Cindy’s digital work represents a new medium, but it may also be what is considered “traditional” one hundred years from now. 

 

Cindy’s artistic style stems from her reflections on the development of human civilization, the destruction of water and soil, and the exhaustion of natural resources. The soy sauce, milk, and abandoned objects around her serve as her inks and pigments. She uses these materials because instinctively dislikes wasting any resource and because they serve as a form of tacit resistance to the gradual pollution of the environment around her. 

 

Cindy’s early works were painted on Chinese paper and canvas; the layers of fiber in the paper absorb ink, so the ink takes root in these layers, becoming greyer and more refined. The tacky ground on the surface of the canvas allows the ink to condense into a glossy black; it looks like a plane, but it actually connotes the two systems of yin and yang. In recent years, environmental protection and the soft interplay of yin and yang have been important issues in Cindy’s artistic explorations, and her experiments with digital technologies have also been centered on these themes. Where the ancients left voids in their paintings, she creates a “rush of white” with milk and a “reserve of black” with soy sauce. In the moment that these creative elements burst in front of the glass pane, a digital camera becomes her brush and paper. The shutter ingeniously preserves the perfect moment of the work’s birth, such that it might be better to call her work a vividly-recorded epic in ink, not simply a digital video. She blends yin and yang into a chaotic digital world. Her most recent works are harsh and severe, daring and forceful. Using the latest technology as a vehicle, her work “reveals infinite changes in heaven and earth and fathoms the subtlety in the universe.” (5)

 

Over the years, Cindy has cleverly combined contemporary ink and technology, making her work both covetable and collectible; Chinese and foreign private collections, as well as several renowned art museums and institutions have collected and exhibited her work, including the Taiwan Museum of Art, the Bank of China Hong Kong, and the Louis Vuitton flagship store in Shanghai.

 

Finally, I would like to thank our colleagues at Another Art Center for their strong support. I hope that visitors will enjoy Romantic Rhythm, and I’m sure that the works will inspire increased concern for environmental change and conservation.

 

Gary Mok 
Autumn 2016, somewhere between Beijing and Hong Kong

1. A reference for the character hui can be found in Book of Odes: Lessons from the States: Jianjia: “The reeds and rushes are deeply green, / And the white dew is turned into hoarfrost. / The man of whom I think, / Is somewhere about the water. / I go up the stream in quest of him, / But the way is difficult and long.”

2. “The law of the Dao is its being what it is” comes from a line in Chapter 25 of Laozi’s Daodejing: “Man takes his law from the Earth; the Earth takes its law from Heaven; Heaven takes its law from the Dao. The law of the Dao is its being what it is.”

3. This comes from Zhang Zao, a Tang dynasty painter, the traces of which can be seen at Notes on Famous Paintings of the Past and Famous Paintings of the Tang Dynasty.

4. Adapted from Shi Tao’s book on painting. He elaborates the “one stroke” method in the first chapter. 

5. Adapted from “to reveal infinite changes and to fathom the subtle” in Zhang Yanyuan’s Notes on Famous Paintings of the Past.