The Poet’s Brush: Chinese Ink Paintings by Lo Ch’ing
February 1 – March 17
UMBC Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture

The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture presents an exhibition of paintings by Lo Ch’ing, a Chinese poet-painter who creates art simultaneously rooted in tradition and expressive of contemporary sensibility. His paintings describe a path between the strong currents of his own short past, the millennia-old past of the Chinese empire, and the demands of today’s postindustrial, consumer-driven and individualist global citizen.

The exhibition, curated by University of Maryland professor Jason Kuo, comprises 30 artworks and represents the artist’s first show in the United States in ten years. Representing four decades of the artistic activity, the selection of works ranges from smaller, poetic compositions of the late 1960s to monumental, post-modern landscapes of 2015. Working in the millennia-old tradition of Chinese ink art, Lo’s paintings include familiar landscape forms of the genre, such as mountains, clouds and river scenes, but he updates this hallowed pictorial language with his own idiosyncratic vocabulary — one that includes an array of modern symbols like airplanes, icons, asphalt and skyscrapers — and aerial views impossible in ancient times.