Installation view, Reconstructed Realities: Gu Gan, Lee Chun-yi, Wucius Wong

Reconstructed Realities: Gu Gan, Lee Chun-yi, Wucius Wong
Closing Saturday, April 26, 2025
120 East 65th Street

This is the final week to catch Reconstructed Realities, featuring the work of Gu Gan, Lee Chun-Yi, and Wucius Wong at Alisan Fine Arts before it closes on April 26! True pioneers of ink art, these three artists took radical approaches to traditional styles of calligraphy, composition and methodology in their work. Their practices have been instrumental in bringing the ink tradition into the global contemporary art conversation.

Born in 1942 in Changsha, Gu Gan is considered the forefather of the modern calligraphy movement and founder of the Modernist School of Chinese Calligraphy. Influenced by European modernists like Kandinsky, Klee, and Miró, he began reimagining calligraphy in the late 1970s with a bold, experimental style. Gu reimagined characters by stretching, merging, or breaking them apart, often combining multiple scripts in one piece. Titles serve as thematic anchors, blending meaning with form. This exhibition includes 1990s works and a rare 2003 piece, Red Autumn, executed in hues of vivid red and orange.

Trained in traditional Chinese ink painting, Lee Chun-Yi nevertheless eschews the brush, and instead reconstructs traditional imagery through the use of hand-carved seals. He stamps images tile by tile with varying pressure and pigment, creating nuanced compositions through this revolutionary technique. This exhibition features misty mountain scenes from his Heart Sutra Landscape series and two colorful works from his new Blossoms series, using Japanese mineral pigments. Up close, Lee’s works—whether floral or landscape—fragment into tiny tiles, reflecting both artistic abstraction and a metaphor for China’s current disunity. His technique bridges macro realism with micro abstraction, revealing the interplay between unity and variation.

Wucius Wong also employs grid-like structures, but in a completely different manner. Known for his analytical precision, he deconstructs traditional landscape motifs to reveal the geometric frameworks beneath. His landscapes are not mere depictions of nature, but reimaginings through geometric abstraction. In Distant Thoughts 23, mountains and rivers are reduced to shapes and lines, reflecting a near-mathematical aesthetic. Purification 15 contrasts a flowing river with stark geometry, embodying the tension between the organic and the constructed. Wong’s water-themed works often explore these dualities, balancing structure and emotion with striking clarity.

Experience the innovation and mastery of these three ink art pioneers before the show closes!

To learn more, click here.