The Liu Kuo-sung Foundation and The Ink Society are delighted to present the ‘Liu Kuo-sung Ink Art Award 2025’. Established and funded by Liu Kuo-sung in 2019, this biennial Award recognizes outstanding achievements in the creation of contemporary ink art in the Greater China region with the aim to highlight and promote the artistic practices of emerging ink artists. Coming to the fourth edition, we are pleased to announce Hong Xuan (b. 1992, lives and works in Taipei) as the winner of this year’s Award, with a cash prize of HKD100,000. Honourable mentions have been awarded to Zhang Wenzhi (b. 1993, lives and works in Beijing) and Huang Jingjie (b. 1988, lives and works in Hangzhou), each with cash prize of HKD20,000.
On behalf of the Jury, Lai Hsiang-ling, Jurist, comments on the Winner:
‘Hong Xuan graduated from the Taipei National University of the Arts. For her, ink is not only an exploration of traditional culture, but a means through which to reconstruct life experience. She was exposed to ink art from an early age, which fostered her deep interest in traditional culture and artistic forms involving different formats of writing. She has thus also continued to use ink as the core of her creative practice. Through serial experimentation, she confronts the contemporary challenge of reflecting our current ethos and life in the ink medium while continuing to innovate its techniques and form.
Hong often takes inspiration from daily observations, recording her encounters with her phone, and she turns elements of ancestral worship and vernacular culture as well as folk images into her creative vocabulary. Her works combine observation and imagination, and they open up new ways of seeing through symbolism, meaning, colour, and compositional reconstruction and juxtaposition. While displaying strong intention, her works also retain the charm of spontaneity, gradually shaping a distinct personal style.
Regarding her material experimentation, Hong tries to create with silk, paper, and even mixed media works that integrate industrial found objects. She continuously overturns the inherent properties of materials—from blending ink and acrylic paint to making her own fluorescent pigment to create halo-like textures. Through the interweaving of ink play, line drawing techniques, and different kinds of framing, Hong constructs multi-layered pictorial spaces.
In terms of display, Hong strives to break through traditional formats of framing and expands two-dimensional painting into spatial installations that integrate multiple works and objects, creating sites of viewing that integrate multiple messages. This kind of expanded perceptual experience guides the audience to reflect on the ink tradition from new perspectives and consider its creative potential in the contemporary context.
In this edition of the Liu Kuo-sung Ink Art Award, Hong has submitted a set of three vertical screens, Longitude Erected, Adamant Rock, and A Song in Progression, for competition. Through unconventional brushwork, colour composition, and experimental framing, the works simulate urban landscape, daily experience, and the flow of time and space, revealing her expansion of ink vocabulary, as well as an experimental spirit in formal aesthetics. The works not only continue Hong's exploration of ink art's contemporaneity, but also reflects her strong personal style and a distinct sense of the times. Thus, her work has received the jury's unanimous recognition.’
Regarding the awardees of Honourable Mention, Alan Yeung, Jurist, comments on behalf of the Jury:
‘Zhang Wenzhi engages with the history of northeast China, particularly his native Dalian. He uses the medium of ink on paper to mix and fuse a variety of images drawn from classical mythology, as well as references to maritime science and trade, war, colonialism, and urbanisation. These different layers of history become tangled in Zhang’s paintings, forcing the viewer to confront their complexity. Huang Jingjie evokes paper folding in delicate colour washes that subtly overlap and transition into each other. The resultant layers appear by turns natural (like mountains and coastlines), artificial (as if torn by hand), and mediated by a digital screen, hovering dreamlike between flatness and landscapes.
This year, the jury had to consider finalists with highly distinctive practices, which made comparison and decision difficult. Nonetheless it is possible to discern some common ground between Zhang and Huang. Both paint appealing and densely layered images that belie disturbing realities, like war or environmental disaster. Both also allude to bapo (‘eight brokens’), a genre of paintings that pastiche fragments of cultural artefacts in an illusionistic manner. Bapo flourished during the late 19th and early 20th century, when China was under stress from Western industrialised modernity. The questions it raised about the meaning of traditional culture remain resonant in the age of AI.
Working in the wake of the post-2000 neo-gongbi movement, Zhang and Huang employ techniques and styles associated with court and professional painters: Zhang with his detailed animals and architecture, and Huang with his delicate layers of colour washes on silk. Like recent winners and finalists of the Liu Kuo-Sung Award, they challenge the stereotype of ink art as monochrome gestural abstraction, and help to redirect the field beyond medium, style, and aesthetics towards discourse, deconstruction, and critical reflexivity. In this sense, they carry on Master Liu’s revolutionary spirit.’
For more information on the Award and the Jury’s full appreciation of the awardees, please visit inksociety.org. We extend our warmest gratitude to the Members of the Jury and Observers:
Jury
Liu Kuo-sung
Zhang Zikang, Professor, Central Academy of Fine Arts
Lai Hsiang-ling, Director, New Taipei City Art Museum
Nancy Lee, Ink Society Director
Alan Yeung, Associate Curator, Ink Art, M+
Observers:
Sun Dongdong, independent curator and art critic
Jiang Jun, independent curator and art critic
Cui Cancan, independent curator
Cheng-I Wu, Assistant Professor, Taipei National University of the Arts
Lee Ho Cheung, Assistant Curator (Xubaizhai), HKMoA (former)
