Last week the world witnessed the first auction with a section devoted exclusively to the sale of contemporary Chinese ink painting. It was held by Guardian, the leading auction house in China, whose director and President Wang Yannan has been one of the first of her countrymen to have identified the significance of ink painting for the new generation of art collectors in China.
The sale was very successful with 92% of the works sold and with new price levels established throughout. There is in fact no mystery as to why ink painting and its manifestations in other media should be attracting the attention of the art-world. Chinese ink painting and calligraphy constitute one of the foundation-stones of Chinese civilisation as well as having produced some of the world's most beautiful works of art.
It's relevance for the Chinese has been dramatically highlighted by the prices paid at auction for works by this generation's predecessors. Prices have soared into the millions of dollars (the most eye-catching of all being the $65 million paid for Eagle Standing on Pine Tree; Four-Character Couplet in Seal Script by Qi Baishi) but as recent major exhibitions in the west testify, institutions the world over are beginning to recognise the relevance of the field.
Following last year's major exhibition at the MFA Boston, the British Museum has this spring opened an ambitious survey of its own outstanding collection of modern ink painting which also includes central examples by contemporary artists. And we ourselves will be presenting the show: INK - the Art of China at the Saatchi Gallery in London from June 18 to July 5 which is probably the most comprehensive exhibition of ink art ever held in an institution of international stature.
I have been a committed lover of contemporary ink painting since the early nineties, having long believed in the field's cultural importance and we have been building collections with visionary art-lovers since then. Many of them have generously lent works to the Saatchi exhibition.
Chinese ink artists are indeed... in Britta Erickson's words.... 'the most idealistic and intellectually daring of China's artists '. They are not afraid, indeed feel themselves obliged, to encompass artistic fundamentals in order to make work that is meaningful for contemporary society in China. These fundamentals demand of them a deep study of their cultural heritage as well as an honest engagement with the artistic imperatives of today.
So just as Cezanne and Picasso assimilated the work of Raphael, Poussin, Velasquez and other old masters to develop their own revolutionary pictorial language, so the ink artists are grappling with the same challenge - how to express the transformation of their society into art that is meaningful precisely because it takes account of the past in order to make sense of the present.
The result of their efforts constitutes one of the most heroic achievements in contemporary aesthetics. Not only have they been able to break the grip of their mighty Chinese cultural legacy without jettisoning its profound values, but they have staked out a new ground in contemporary global culture. While preserving or reclaiming what is vital in their cultural inheritance and adapting it to the realities of experience today, they aim at the high and serious task of the honest artiss to create works as a platform for the highest reaches of human aspiration.
What a relief from the shallow antics of so much of the vaudeville performances of today's big names. The teasing conceptual parlour-games of Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons and even the equally effective self-publicising achievements of Ai Wei Wei ring hollow when set alongside work that intend to be judged for what it is and no more. The ink artists are not interested in peddling the latest post-modernist polemic or political agenda... nor are they so much concerned with the ' what's new ' as with what's true.
INK - the Art of China at the Saatchi Gallery in London runs form from June 18 to July 5 www.michalegoedhuis.com