New landscapes
Bingyi, 51, a Beijing-born artist with a PhD in art history from Yale University, has reimagined traditional Chinese shanshui (mountain and water) landscape painting for the contemporary era, revitalizing the ink tradition as a dynamic and evolving art form.
She has produced monumental, site-specific ink paintings in nature, allowing natural forces such as gravity and wind to replace the traditional brush—seamlessly blending ancient Chinese ink art with elements of land and performance art. In contrast, her other works use fine-line xieyibrushwork—nuanced and semiabstract—to express subjective perception rather than objective reality.
Bingyi's "Impossible Landscapes" series includesLife and Death(2018), a work featured in the Beijing show. Through its rhythmic, repetitive brushwork depicting waves, the piece mesmerizes viewers and serves as a metaphor for life's cyclical nature.
Building bridges
The expatriate experience in the US has enabled some artists to broaden their artistic vision or deepen their understanding of heritage and identity, while others draw inspiration to bridge cultures through art.
Artist Zheng Xuewu, 62, has played an important role in facilitating Sino-US artistic exchanges. His labor-intensive installation Century Text (2006-present), weaves global newspapers into paper rolls resembling ancient Chinese bamboo slips, fostering a dialogue between present and past, modernity and tradition, East and West.
Artist Xu Bing, who arrived in New York in 1990 at the age of 35, turned his experience of being a foreigner as a creative tool. Continuing his interest in deconstructing languages and semiotics, the artist developed "Square Word Calligraphy," a unique writing system marrying the English alphabet and Chinese calligraphy.
Xu assigned each English letter a specific stroke or component that fits into a square shape, making English readable in a Chinese format and endowing the Western language with a calligraphic beauty. Blowing in the Wind, a new work the MacArthur fellow made for the Beijing exhibition in 2025, forces English-speaking viewers to "unlearn" their language to appreciate Bob Dylan's lyrics through a fresh, calligraphic lens.
Mirror in Others: The American Experience of Chinese Contemporary Artists, running until March 23, is part of a series of events organized by the Beijing American Center to celebrate the 250thanniversary of signing the Declaration of Independence.
