The Artsy Vanguard 2019: Hao Liang

Hao Liang’s epic contemporary take on ancient Chinese ink-wash painting has made him an art-world fixture in his home country. Hao’s work pays homage to the history of Chinese literati tradition—the scholar-painters of old who expressed their philosophies through handscrolls, portraits, and majestic landscape paintings where subtle qualities of light and shadow play out over mountain peaks and carefully cultivated gardens. In the young artist’s work, the twist is the way in which the silk paintings’ ancient origins morph into the contemporary.

Hao combines figuration with abstraction; fuses the influences of Chinese tradition with Wassily Kandinsky, Sergei Eisenstein, and Gilles Deleuze; and introduces timeless subject matter to the modern, industrial world—spinning ferris wheels dot classic landscapes to create a soaring sense of cosmic time and space.

Curator Barbara Pollack noted that Hao “has mastered not only the sensitive application of ink, but the multiple perspectives that reside simultaneously in many scroll paintings.” She added, “He seeks to instill in the modern viewer the sublime sensations that masterpieces of Chinese painting are capable of evoking, while integrating elements of Surrealism and biomorphic abstraction from Western art history.”