MOMO - SILENT INK

默墨

by Xie Rong (aka Echo Morgan)

Date: 15th November

Location: SOAS GALLERY

Address: SOAS University of London, 10 Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square,
London, WC1H 0XG

Time: 5 pm - 6 pm. (please arrive 10 mins early)

Curated by Katie Hill FRSA
Portrait by Jamie Baker

Momo 默墨 - Silent Ink draws inspiration from Jizi’s cosmic ink paintings and his struggles as an intellectual navigating political and historical turmoil, reflecting the silence of generational trauma and evoking today’s forbidden Heaven Songs from Afghanistan.

Renowned musicians BeibeiWang and Cheng Yu will perform live with Xie Rong, standing in solidarity with Afghan women’s unimaginable realities, embodying the call from within the burqa.

Fragmented sounds from the Silk Road, contributed by Uyghur musician @shohretttt Turkish double-neck baglama player @ozan_baysal , Afghan drumming recorded by @seedsofsounduk , and Kazakh kui by @dombra_dizzyac , weave into a powerful soundscape composed by Wang Beibei, echoing Rong’s own childhood struggles and amplifying the silenced voices and songs of freedom.

This performance reimagines ink as a vessel for the female voice, exploring the search for refuge in cosmic energies and the healing found through shared, broken silences. Here, the live performance becomes a journey into communal resilience, uncovering solace and strength within the collective voice.

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SOAS Gallery

https://www.soas.ac.uk/about/event/strange-wonders-jizi-and-pioneers-contemporary-ink-china

The exhibition has been made possible by the generous support of the UNSW Judith Neilson Chair of Contemporary Art.

STRANGE WONDERS - JIZI AND OTHER PIONEERS OF INK

Date

10 October 2024 to 14 December 2024

Time

10:30 am to 5:00 pm

Venue

SOAS Gallery

https://www.soas.ac.uk/about/event/strange-wonders-jizi-and-pioneers-contemporary-ink-china

The exhibition has been made possible by the generous support of the UNSW Judith Neilson Chair of Contemporary Art.

Strange Wonders is taken from a poem written in the 14th century by the ink painter Ni Zan (1301-1374). The term evokes the mysterious awe that nature elicits in the individual in the Chinese landscape tradition, echoed by European romanticism and the related emergence of modernism in the 19th and 20th centuries.

It could also refer to subconscious states of mind explored by the surrealist movement in the early to mid-twentieth century, when artists such as Leonora Carrington painted fantastical imagery evoking dreamlike worlds whereby outright order and rationality are left behind and inner desires unleashed.

The sub-theme Dreams, Desires and Daoism explores the idea of the inner self through the resonation of Chinese Daoist thought to contemporary ink practices and aesthetics. As such, it gives a discursive grounding to Chinese artistic forms within a transnational cultural context. In the words of John Hay, desires in the ink tradition can be read in the textural surface and depth of the works and ‘hang on the threads of multi-layered cultural allusions’.

The enigmatic quality of modern and contemporary ink works can be read within these discursive and art historical legacies. As hybrid forms woven from a variety of cultural threads in the modern period, they can be read in dialogue with a Chinese cultural legacy that consists of a syncretic tradition of Confucianist-Buddhist-Daoist thought reaching back more than two thousand years.