Inherit · Give · Scatter · Forge
Tradition rarely travels in a straight line.
A poem written centuries earlier appears again in Dong Qichang’s calligraphy. Huang Binhong looks back to older painters while finding a language of his own. Elsewhere, names written quietly on a painting tell us who the work was once made for, or given to.
In the present, Taiwanese artist Huang Bohan approaches the same history from another material, drawing from Chinese painting, poetry and the form of the scholar’s object to make his hand-hammered silver works.
Passed On brings these works together across different periods, not to trace a neat history of Chinese art, but to look at the smaller ways culture continues: through looking, making, giving, remembering and starting again.
The form may change. Something of it remains.