December 30, 2025 — Art-Ba-Ba

Zhu Wei’s New Works: The Possibility of Ink Painting as a Global Lingua Franca

“Zhu Wei’s new works deliberately avoid theoretical disputes, and he prefers instead to focus on exploring concrete problems. These new experiments do not attempt to elevate ink painting into a form of cultural belief; rather, they treat it as a method and a tool.”

Written by / Jerome

Edited by / Art-Ba-Ba Office

Images courtesy of the artist and Linda Art Center

On November 21, Zhu Wei: New Works Exhibition opened at the Linda Art Center (Beijing). The exhibition presents 150 small-scale monochrome ink works created by the artist over the past two years. The characteristic visual language seen in his earlier works — the notion that “brush and ink should follow the times” — as well as the traditional full format of ink painting, including poetic inscriptions and seal impressions, are absent in these new works. The works are organized into four thematic series: figures, still life, architecture, and technique. The ink lines and washes are steady and delicate, yet as one moves through the exhibition, the gaze is easily caught by certain “punctum-like” points of disruption. The artist no longer uses objects as vehicles for symbolic expression; instead, he focuses on constructing a tension between ink as a medium and the images it produces.

At the intersection of contemporaneity and global discourse, Zhu Wei — an artist with decades of experience — demonstrates an increasingly self-consistent development in ink painting. In these new works, there is no convoluted rhetoric; they appear direct, unforced, and imbued with a vivid sense of life.

Zhu Wei treats ink painting as a method. The purpose behind this method is to transform pure water and ink into a pictorial language that, like oil painting, can circulate globally. Ink itself functions as color — it conveys sensory and cognitive experience, much like drawing, which is a classical form of training in representation. As a fundamental visual structure for understanding the world, it should ideally possess qualities of accessibility and ease of use. Therefore, this new body of work is not a simple answer to questions such as “what to paint,” “how to paint,” or “what to paint with,” but rather a series of open-ended experiments and sharp interrogations of methodology itself.

“Applying ink produces five colors” — thus wrote Zhang Yanyuan of the Tang dynasty in Record of Famous Painters of All Dynasties. In this exhibition, one group of works is titled Ink Divides into Five Colors. This is a core concept in ink painting: its essence lies in adjusting the ratio of ink and water to express rich variations of tone, depth, and atmosphere through a single ink color. The “five colors” are often described as scorched, dense, heavy, light, and clear. However, if we analyze Zhu Wei’s paintings according to this system, we find that the “scorched” and “dense” tones are absent. There is no highly saturated, glossy, deep black brushwork; even “heavy” tones appear rarely and with restraint. More water is mixed into the ink, resulting in a predominantly gray tonality. Relationships of distance and light are expressed through the “light” category. “Clear” refers to brushstrokes made with only a trace of ink, leaving faint gray impressions like morning mist or evening haze, creating a blurred, atmospheric quality. These gray traces sometimes also appear in portraiture, resembling the fleeting silhouette left behind when a flash briefly exposes a figure against a background. Such use of ink seems almost unprecedented in the thousands-year history of ink painting. In classical painting theory, even the white of the paper itself is sometimes counted as a “color,” forming what is called the “six tones.” Interestingly, the paper used for ink painting is not the cold, industrially bleached white of modern manufacturing; it carries instead a subtle, softly gray, slightly atmospheric texture.

Water and ink, in their simplest combination, generate complex variations on the surface of the paper. Zhu Wei is already a seasoned practitioner of ink painting, yet he admits that only in recent years has he begun to fully grasp its deeper subtleties. Moving from complexity to simplicity, elements such as poetic inscriptions and seals — the traditional literati symbols — become unnecessary. They disappear, leaving only the most fundamental structural framework of ink painting. The artist’s repeated experiments on works of the same small format resemble a form of basic training. When he titles the works Ink Divides into Five Colors, what he is adopting is a kind of “appropriation strategy.” There is no intention of antiquarian reverence; he does not seek to affirm classical theory. Within the lightness of his ink tones lies a subtle, alert skepticism — like a needle hidden in cotton. Perhaps the ancients themselves did not treat “five” or “six” as literal numbers, yet later generations rigidified them into fixed doctrine. “Five colors” or “six tones” thus became prescriptive rules that one must first learn before engaging with ink painting.

When creativity becomes suffocated, how can a genre of painting avoid reaching a “dead end”? Zhu Wei modestly refers to himself as a beginner in ink painting. Here, the signifier of “ink painting” remains unchanged, but the artist has updated its signified — not through any conceptual trick of “putting new wine into old bottles,” but by returning to the essential nature of both “bottle” and “wine” themselves. He is not attempting to endlessly question what ink painting might still look like today. Instead, he advances a logically rigorous proposition: ink painting is, and can only be, painting. Just like looking at an oil painting, one should treat it simply as painting — as one possible mode of expression. It is still alive, not a dying or already-dead “cultural heritage.” When a viewer’s gaze penetrates the subtle ink tones on the paper, how can one still insist that ink contains only five colors? In this way, the freedom of ink painting is liberated from the closed system of tradition; it no longer falls into the trap of rigid rules and formulas, but actively participates in the reconstruction of the world with renewed vitality.

Everything can be painted. Figures, animals, small objects, architecture, aircraft, even historical documents and old photographs — all become subjects that Zhu Wei renders in ink. The boundaries of ink painting are thus expanded, overlapping with the entire field of contemporary visual culture. It feels as if the artist is “capturing” these images. They exist within everyday life, at varying distances from us. The “farther” ones are those images shaped by history and ideas. When discussing architectural subjects, Zhu Wei mentions the traditional practice of “jiehua” (measured drawing) in ancient China, where painters used rulers and straightedges to render architectural forms with extreme precision. Yet ink painting as a tradition has never attempted such exact spatial representation. Old rules are hard to change, and the absence of precedent often implies that something cannot be painted at all. But the artist refuses to accept this limitation. The buildings in his works are all iconic structures — both classic monuments of the People’s Republic and well-known Western landmarks. Any deeper ideological interpretation of these buildings is deliberately cut off; Zhu Wei simply wants viewers to recognize them, and then, in turn, be surprised to realize: “this is actually ink painting.”

The artist’s selection of portrait subjects is highly diverse: musicians, scientists, writers, thinkers — well-known figures across different fields. Seen together, these portraits inevitably recall Venice Biennale 1972, where Gerhard Richter presented his series of 48 portraits. The faces of public figures reveal the power of images in constructing identity and narrative. Richter intentionally gathered them into a reflection on imagery that goes beyond representation itself. Zhu Wei’s ink portraits, however, do not aim to produce a critical “distancing” effect. On the contrary, he hopes these images can function directly as channels of communication. The faces of these influential figures from various fields are widely recognized symbols within their respective cultures; they themselves have already become nodes of knowledge and coordinates. Once they are recognized, they activate a bodily memory embedded in viewers. In this way, the ancient medium of ink painting becomes a medium of human communication in the present day. Meanwhile, on another wall of the exhibition space, ink-rendered old photographs quietly narrate memories of the past. Shared memories of family and relatives diffuse across the paper surface, giving delicate emotional intimacy its most graceful expression.

These ink paintings are like a series of “fuses,” triggering a dispute between the eye and the brain. Vision is more concerned with the sensory form of water and ink, while the mind — conditioned by the era of image-reading — continuously directs attention toward the deeper semantics of the image. Small everyday objects, under prolonged gaze, acquire a kind of transcendental significance, while the large aircraft and submarines clearly symbolize technology and violence. Faced with these objects, the artist suspends judgment. This is not a form of moderation, but rather a refusal to be captured by any fixed standpoint. If this body of new works is compared to an all-encompassing novel, then Zhu Wei indeed infuses each sentence with a distinctly personal tone. Here, the best sensory organs are not the eyes, but rather the ear and the hand. We “hear” the work speaking, and are then invited to touch the hidden thorns — to squeeze this “cotton mass” of ink wash and let its “needle tip” signal us. We also encounter a hard, resistant backbone — a kind of stubborn counterforce. Throughout history, no one has created ink painting in quite this way. Zhu Wei does not wish to repeat received ideas; he is sharp, rebellious, and opens a new horizon for ink painting.

“Piercing Silence”

The Silence by Ingmar Bergman is set in an environment where language cannot be understood. In its climactic sequence, suppressed emotions finally erupt. At that moment, language ceases to be an obstacle, and misaligned expressions pierce through the barriers of communication. We might place contemporary Chinese ink painting in a similar situation to the film’s protagonists: its self-expression rarely crosses cultural boundaries. Zhu Wei once said: “After the ’85 New Wave and the New Literati Painting movement, ink painting as a practice actually stagnated. This stagnation was caused by the pressure exerted by contemporary oil painting and other Western-imported forms of contemporary art.” Under multiple pressures, the space of ink painting has been pushed to the margins. It seems to have been reduced to a spectacle viewed only through the lens of cultural difference. In essence, this compression is a deprivation of its language. Painting itself is indeed silent, but beneath this silence, Zhu Wei insists on unfolding a form of “cross-linguistic” articulation.

Silence is broken. Ink painting appears in Zhu Wei’s recent works with a truly “contemporary” and “universal” face. Along the vertical axis of time, ink painting moves in parallel with the present tense (from the Latin tempus, the etymological root of “contemporary”). The textual interpretations of the past can no longer account for today’s ink painting. The theoretical coordinates established by contemporary art history to frame ink painting are also not necessarily able to determine its future. Along the horizontal axis of geography, Zhu Wei’s ink painting is no longer tied to any notion of a “national form,” and understanding his work does not depend on any Eastern cultural system. In his view: “The mild and non-extreme nature of ink painting allows it to be used by everyone. A picky, harsh, overly pedantic, pseudo-intellectual kind of painting could not possibly still survive today… Anyone can paint ink painting; it is easy to get started with, and there are no real taboos. The materials are cheap and convenient — you just do whatever works.” Rather than describing ink painting’s movement toward the world and everyday life as “cultural export,” it would be more accurate to see it as a foundational “reconstruction of language.” The cultural burden attached to ink painting becomes lighter; it turns into a transferable language for expressing what one sees and thinks.

In his new works, Zhu Wei deliberately avoids theoretical disputes and prefers instead to focus on concrete problems. His new explorations do not aim to elevate ink painting into a kind of cultural belief; they treat it instead as method and tool. Only when more people use ink painting at the level of method can a shared understanding of it truly become possible. Bold hypotheses, careful verification — this experiment in ink painting begins from below and does not stop at the “five colors of ink.” It has no upper limit and no lower boundary. Looking back at the path Zhu Wei has taken over the past decades, one sees a continuity of practical rationality infused with experimentation and innovation. His earlier book title Behind of Your Time may have been a form of modesty. At this moment, through ink painting, he is already “walking ahead of the times.”

Link: Art-Ba-Ba

二零二五年十二月三十日Art-Ba-Ba

朱伟新作：水墨作为世界流通语言的可能

“朱伟的新作刻意避开理论之争，更愿意多研究些问题。新的尝试无意将水墨升华为某种文化信仰，它是方法和工具。”

撰文 / Jerome

编辑 / Art-Ba-Ba办公室

图片致谢艺术家及林大艺术中心

11月21日，“朱伟新作展”在林大艺术中心 (北京) 开幕，展览呈现了艺术家近两年以来创作的150幅小尺幅的单色水墨画。艺术家先前作品中“笔墨当随时代”的标志性语言，以及传统水墨中题诗与钤印的完整形制，均未出现在新作之中。新作按题材分类为人物、静物、建筑、技法四个系列。水墨的勾画晕染沉稳细腻，但依次从这些作品面前走过时，目光很容易被一些“刺点”所捕获。艺术家不再“托物言志”，而是着力构造水墨这一媒介与其呈现之象间的张力。

在当代化与世界化的交叉地带，拥有数十年经验的朱伟在水墨画上的推进愈发自洽。在新作中，我们读不出迂回的修辞，它们自在直接，有着鲜活的生命力。

朱伟将水墨作为方法，方法背后的目的即是将纯然的水与墨，处理成像油画那样世界通行的绘画语言。墨即是色，它传达着感官与头脑的经验，犹如素描这种经典的造型训练。作为把握世界的基本视觉结构，它理当具备便捷与易操作的特性。因此，这批新作不是对“画什么？”“怎么画？”以及“用什么画”的简洁回答，而是一次次开放性的实验及对方法论一连串犀利的诘问。

“运墨而五色具”——唐代张彦远在《历代名画记》中如此写道。在此次展览中有一组作品便以“墨分五色”来命名。这是水墨画的核心概念，其操作的精髓在于调配墨汁与水的比例，用单一的墨色表现出丰富的色彩、层次和神韵。五色，一说是焦、浓、重、淡、清。但是，若以五色来对应分析朱伟的画面，我们却发现“焦”与“浓”是缺席的。画中见不到极浓的、有光泽的、黝黑的笔墨，甚至“重”的出现也非常稀少且克制。墨中加水较多，呈灰色。远近与明暗的关系由“淡”来表现。“清”，意味着仅蘸取一点墨的笔留下浅浅的灰影，若朝雾夕烟，营造出朦胧的意境。灰影有时也会出现在人物肖像中，恰如当闪光灯曝光时人物身后瞬间出现的轮廓，这种墨色的使用在几千年水墨画的历史中似乎从未出现过。古代画论中尚有将纸本身的白合计入“色”中，是为“六彩”。微妙的是，笔墨所落的纸张并非是经过现代工业漂洗过的冷白，它自带一种阴柔的灰蒙质地。

水与墨，二者以极简的组合，在纸面创设繁复的变化。朱伟早已是与水墨打交道的“老手”，不过，他坦言自己直至近几年才参悟到其真正的精妙之处。由繁入简，词句与印章等文人的符号就显得多余。它们消失了，仅剩下水墨最原始的表现框架。艺术家在相同尺幅上的重复实验，像是在进行着某种基础训练。当他为作品命名为“墨分五色”的时候，他所奉行的只是一种“拿来主义”。崇古的心不在，他不愿去附和古典的理论。清淡的墨色里有着一种机敏的质疑，就像绵里藏针。或许，先人也不曾将“五”或“六”视作实数，但后来的俗夫却将这划分奉为圭臬。五色抑或六彩，反倒成了学习水墨时需要预先遵循的刻板规则。

当创造力遭遇窒息，一个画种又如何能避免走入“穷途末路”呢？朱伟十分谦虚地将自己称为水墨的入门者。此处，水墨的能指依旧不变，但艺术家更新了其所指——这绝非是什么瓶子装什么酒的逻辑戏法，而是回归到“瓶”或“酒”的本质层面。他不是要无尽地追问水墨在今天到底还可能有怎样的面貌，而是用一个逻辑严谨的表达来阐明：水墨画是且仅是绘画。和观看一张油画一样，人们应当把它当作绘画，视其为表达的一种可能性。它仍是活着的，不是濒死或已死的“文化遗产”。当观看者的眼目探入纸上细腻的墨色时，谁还能坚信墨仅有五色呢。如此一来，水墨的自由从传统的封闭体系里被解放出来，它不再陷入章法的圈套，而是充满活力地参与着对世界的重构。

万物均可入画。人物、动物、小物件、建筑、飞行器甚至历史资料和老照片都是朱伟用水墨来摹写的对象。水墨的边界拓展开，与当代视觉文化的整个范畴重合。艺术家好像在“摄取”这些物象。它们存于日常，与生活有着或远或近的不同距离。所谓“远”一些的，是被历史与观念所笼罩的图像。谈及入画的建筑体时，朱伟提到古代的“界画”，画师在作画时使用界尺引线，无比准确地将建筑复现。然而，水墨一流却不曾去如此精准地把握建筑空间。祖宗之法难变，没有先例似乎就等同于宣示画不了。可偏偏艺术家不信这个“邪”。画中的建筑都是标志性的，既有共和国的经典，也有西方国家的地标。对建筑背后意识形态的深究戛然而止，朱伟只想让我们识别出它们，然后回过头来再惊讶地发现“这竟是水墨”。

艺术家对水墨肖像的取材十分多元。音乐家、科学家、作家、思想家等等，皆为我们所熟悉的名人。这些肖像陈列在一起，很难不令人联想起里希特 (Gerhard Richter) 在1972年威尼斯双年展上展出的四十八张肖像画。名人的面容勾勒出图像塑造身份与叙事的权力，里希特意在汇聚一股超越图像的反思力量。而朱伟的水墨肖像无意起到“间离”的批判效果。恰恰相反，他希望这些形象本身就可以起到沟通的作用。这些各领域巨擘的脸庞是其所属文化体里人人皆知的符号，他们本身已然成为知识和坐标。一旦识别出他们，就会触及到一股根植于身体的记忆。由此，古老的水墨在今天担当起人与人交流的媒介。同时在展厅的另一边，靠水墨呈现的老照片微声倾诉着过去的回忆，亲人及家庭的共同记忆在纸面上晕开，恰为私密的情愫写下最美的注脚。

这些水墨画犹如一根根“导火索”，引发眼睛与大脑的争辩。视觉更在意水与墨的感性形式，而经过读图时代驯化的头脑则不停地将注意力引向图像的深层语义。周遭的小物件在凝视下获得了某种超验的意味，而那些硕大的飞行器和潜艇无疑象征着技术与暴力。面对这些物，艺术家悬置了自己的判断。这并非中庸，而是不为特定的立场所网罗。若将这批新作比作一册包罗万象的小说，那么朱伟确实为每一词句都染上了独属于他的语气。在这里，最佳的感知器官并不是眼睛，而是耳与手。我们“听”他说话，再被邀请去触摸隐藏的刺。去捏一捏墨晕这个“棉团”，让“针尖”给我们提示。我们还会摸到一块坚硬的反骨——古往今来，没有人如此创作水墨。朱伟不想人云亦云，他犀利、反叛，为水墨开启新局。

“击穿沉默”

伯格曼 (Ernst Ingmar Bergman) 的电影《沉默》 (The Silence, 1963) 将剧情设定在一个语言不通的环境中。在影片的高潮段落，受压抑的情绪终于爆发。那时，语言不再是障碍，错位的倾诉击穿了沟通的壁垒。我们或许可以将中国当代水墨带入影片主角的相似境遇内，它的自我言说鲜有跨越文化的隔阂。朱伟曾言：“'85新潮和新文人画运动之后水墨画的创作实际上是停滞了，这种停滞是因为受到当代油画和其他西方传来的当代艺术形式的挤压。”在多重挤压下，水墨的空间被边缘化。它似乎只能在文明差异的视野下沦为一道景观。本质上，挤压是对其语言的剥夺。画本身诚然是静默的，但在无言的表象下，朱伟却决意展开“跨语际”的诉说。

沉默被打破。水墨以真正“当代”的、“通用”的面容在朱伟近作里现身。在纵向的时间线索里，水墨与当下的时间 (拉丁语tempus，contemporary当代性的词源) 同行。过去的文字解释不了今天的水墨。当代艺术史为了书写水墨所设立的理论坐标也未必能决定水墨的未来。在横向的地理线索中，朱伟的水墨不再关乎某种“民族形式”，对其作品的理解不需依赖东方的文化系统。在他看来：“水墨自身温和、不极端的特性使它可以为所有人使用，一个刁钻、刻薄、没多少科学含量、事儿逼似的画种也不可能今天还活着……人人都能画水墨，很容易上手，没有什么忌讳。材料便宜好用，怎么合适就怎么来。”与其说走向世界、融入生活的水墨是一种“文化输出”，不如说此乃一种奠基性的“语言重构”。附着在水墨之上的文化包袱变得轻盈，它成为一套表达所见所思的流通性语言。

朱伟在新作中刻意避开理论之争，更愿意多研究些问题。新的尝试无意将水墨升华为某种文化信仰，它是方法和工具。唯有更多人在方法的层面上使用了水墨，对其的普遍理解方成为可能。大胆假设，小心求证——这场水墨的实验起步于山下，不会止步于五色之墨，它上不封顶下不设限。回望朱伟过去数十载所走的道路，实验与创新中所渗透的实用理性绵延至今。他曾经的书题《走在时间的后头》也许是一种自谦。此刻，他已因着水墨“走在时代之前”。

Link: Art-Ba-Ba