WANG TIANDE (b.1960) Digital No. 06-M36, 2006WANG TIANDE (b.1960)Digital No. 06-M36, 2006Ink on xuan paper, burn marks, large panel, framed. 133cm long x 66cm wide (52 1/2in long x 26in wide).王天德(1960年生) 數碼No. 06-MH31 水墨、焰紙本 鏡框 2006年作Born in Shanghai in 1960, Wang Tiande is one of the most innovative calligraphers in China. A graduate of the Chinese Painting Department at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in 1988, he is now Dean and professor in the Art and Design Department at Fudan University in Shanghai. Wang's art is a serious meditation on the precarious relation between permanence and fleeting efflorescence, between the material and the immaterial, between past and present, between tradition and contemporaneity.He started to create his Digital series when he was on an artist's residency in Paris in 2002. A portion of his cigarette accidentally fell onto a piece of paper and hollowed it out; Wang drew inspiration from the burning and developed it into a creative technique. Furthermore, his direct encounter with contemporary art in Paris, especially conceptual art, not only inspired new approaches in his own work but also further convinced him of his love for the language of ink. In the Digital series Wang Tiande paints landscapes and calligraphies onto xuan paper and then enriches the images with cigarette burns. Rich in form and content, this series goes beyond any boundaries dividing painting and calligraphy. Wang Tiande's works are collected in several important and prestigious museums and galleries globally, including the British Museum, London; The Shanghai Art Museum; the Shenzhen Art Museum; Hong Kong Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. See a similar work by Wang Tiande, illustrated by C.Von Spee, Modern Chinese Ink Paintings, London, 2012, pp.98-99, no.28. For a related landscape by Wang Tiande, see Ink Worlds: Contemporary Chinese Painting from the Collection of Akiko Yamazaki and Jerry Yang, Stanford, 2018, p.78 and 197; and also China Onward: the Estella Collection, Chinese Contemporary Art, 1966-2006, Humlebaek, 2009, pp.290-291.