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introduction

Foreword to Allison Liu's Tokyo Solo Exhibition

Over the years, through countless encounters with artists from across Asia, I find myself returning to a single question: what becomes of tradition when it enters the contemporary?

For me, this is not a mere matter of inheritance or incorporating traditional motifs into contemporary art. I would like to think of it as a process of translation — one in which cultural and visual experiences are reinterpreted by artists, and rematerialise as a new visual language giving a voice to the new era.

Ink painting is particularly resonant in this regard.

It has a long history — not only as a painterly medium, but also as an embodiment of Eastern cultural understandings of nature, space, and the relationship between humans and the world. How might one carry these experiences into the present without becoming confined by tradition? This question has long intrigued me.

This very question is what draws me to Allison Liu's practice.

As an artist, aesthetics scholar, and collector, Liu constantly navigates between artistic practice and art-historical inquiries. For her, tradition is not something to be reached for—it is already there, entwined in her everyday experience.

In her earlier, more recognisably traditional landscape paintings, one can still trace the structural principles and brush-and-ink foundations of Chinese landscape painting. Yet as her practice has evolved, these landscapes have gradually been deconstructed and transformed into the relationships of color, line, plane, and space. In her Tiger series, landscape is no longer merely a backdrop—it enters the subject itself, becoming embedded in its very form.

Liu holds onto her experiences of ink painting and transforms its inherited structure. She retains landscape and liberates it from its conventional form. In her work, tradition is not repetition—it is where creation begins.

To me, this transformation is a form of translation.

The "contemporary" is not about modernising ink painting. What truly matters is how tradition, once absorbed and distilled through the lens of a contemporary artist, transforms—and how it comes to inhabit a painting of our time.

This act of "translation" is what I hope to bring to Tokyo.

China and Japan share deep cultural traditions of ink, calligraphy, landscape, and nature, while each has developed its own modern visual language through distinct historical trajectories. Tokyo, then, is not simply where these works exhibit; it is part of the translation itself, a living presence in the dialogue.

When a landscape rooted in Chinese visual tradition is reinterpreted through the hands of Allison Liu and recontextualized within Japanese culture, how might it be perceived anew—and what dialogues does this cross-cultural translation awaken?
I hope audiences in Tokyo will find something familiar in these works—and, alongside it, something they have never seen before.

Perhaps that is the very power of translation: it does not seek a single, settled answer to tradition, but allows it to keep generating new possibilities as it moves across eras and cultures.

We hope you enjoy Beyond Landscape.

Sun Tianyu
I.F. Gallery

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