In the Rockwell Gallery, Floor 5
Over his long career, the Shanghai-based artist Wang Tiande (Chinese, born 1960) has sought innovative ways to use historical traditions of Chinese ink painting and calligraphy as a catalyst for his contemporary conceptual approach. Trained in Chinese painting and calligraphy practice at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, Hangzhou, Wang later earned a PhD in Chinese calligraphy and now teaches at Fudan University, Shanghai.
Serendipity led his ink art practice in unexpected directions. In 2002, when he accidentally dropped ash from his cigarette onto a paper work, causing a small burn, he recognized new potential. Wang transformed his practice and began to create his signature landscapes composed of a painting or calligraphy on xuan paper, overlaid with a fibrous paper layer that has been carefully burned with brushstroke-like marks using cigarettes or incense sticks. Years later, as he was looking at some Ming-dynasty paintings in a friend’s collection, the idea came to him to combine actual historical paintings and calligraphy with his own burned and painted works. This set him on a path of voraciously collecting older artworks, and literally layering them with or attaching them, or reproductions of them, to his own creations.
Mirror Impressions considers dialogues between art and nature, the ancient and the contemporary, and, more philosophically, the traces of personal life and history that are reflected in the mind. Recent works highlight several of Wang’s artistic approaches, including landscapes combined with ink rubbings or hung with actual historic works from the artist’s collection; silk robes burned with Ming-dynasty poems; and plaster sculptures made from molds of ancient Chinese tomb figurines. Each work of art consists of additions and subtractions through which the artist seeks a philosophical and religious understanding—for example, the different colors of the plaster figurines’ bases signify traces of human activities and an individual’s karma. For the artist, this mirroring becomes a metaphor for the Chinese Chan (Zen) concept of the Buddha nature that reflects, but does not change or participate.
We are grateful to Associate Professor An-yi Pan, Department of the History of Art and Visual Studies, and Amala Lane, former coordinator at the East Asia Program, for nominating Wang Tiande to be the 2025 Wong Chai Lok Calligraphy Fellow and for contributing to this installation and its programming. This fellowship, administered by Cornell’s East Asia Program and honoring Hong Kong calligrapher Wong Chai Lok (1924–2022), was established for the purpose of celebrating the vitality of Chinese calligraphy today by bringing a prominent Chinese calligrapher to exhibit their work and participate in curricular and public programs at Cornell University.
Ellen Avril
Chief Curator and the Judith H. Stoikov Curator of Asian Art