Qualia Contemporary Art is pleased to present our inaugural presentation at EXPO Chicago: a group exhibition featuring works by Xu Bing, Wang Dongling, Tai Xiangzhou, Wang Tiande, Zhang Yu, Chu Chu, Victoria Yau, Hung Liu, and Huang Hairong. This nine-artist, cross-generational survey of contemporary Chinese art migrates between neo-calligraphy, cosmological landscape, and tampered-with surfaces—at once venerative of Chinese ink tradition and rebellious. The presentation is anchored by Chicago's deep institutional engagement with contemporary Chinese art: Tai Xiangzhou, whose work is held by the Art Institute of Chicago and who was the subject of the museum's 2021 exhibition Cosmoscapes, and Victoria Yau (1939–2023), whose work was recently acquired by Northwestern's Block Museum of Art and exhibited at Stanford University's Center for East Asian Studies.
Together, these nine artists span three generations and multiple continents, yet share an inheritance: the brush, the ink, the paper. Each remakes it through a distinct act of departure—against legibility, against linear memory, against stable surfaces. Contemporary Chinese ink is positioned here not only as a continuation of tradition, but as a living argument, fluid as the medium itself.
