Paintings Redrawn
Hui Shi, or painting-related matters, is the term for painting in ancient China. Compared with the more commonly used modern concepts of "painting", or even "oil painting", "print" and "acrylic on canvas", Hui Shi is not classified into a single subject. More importantly, it emphasizes that painting is a matter and an activity. There is a kind of continuity hidden in the concept. It does not distinguish between subject and object (i.e., painter and painting), nor the ancient and the modern. In other words, painting, as a matter, is alive in the term of Hui Shi.
Things are always changing in terms of how to paint, as Hui Shi, or paintings are always being retold. The retold stories are certainly not made out of thin air. Since there is the “new”, naturally the “old” also exists, especially in China where our rich local painting tradition still thrives as a coordinate in silence, or a treasure in quietness. Someone should pick up the tradition and offer it a new kind of vitality with the contemporary experience.
The exhibition of Paintings Retold is delighted to invite four artists who responds to the Chinese painting traditions from their own individual perspectives. In his/her works, we can see literati, folk, medieval, modern, pictorial, symbolic, stylised and intermediary expressions...those pasts that we are not unfamiliar with. They decomposed, disrupted, and reorganized these traditions, and they were also activating and advancing these them, not only in painting, but also in many other things.
