Born in Shanghai in 1960, Wang Tiande is one of the most innovative calligraphers in China: he recently created calligraphic works by the planting of new grass or by having sheep eat grass away in the shape of characters. A graduate of the Chinese Painting Department at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in 1988, he is now dean and professor at 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. His direct encounter with contemporary art, especially conceptual art, in Paris not only inspired him to 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.
