Curatorial thesis

In Asia, painting was never separated from philosophy. Ink and paper are not a technique: they are a complete system of thought and creation, rooted in Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism, where process matters as much as result and the act of painting is a form of self-cultivation. The literati tradition — scholar-painters who made art an intellectual and symbolic practice — anticipated by centuries concepts the Western canon attributes to the twentieth century: abstraction, conceptual art, the primacy of gesture and process.

My thesis is that the Contemporary Ink Movement is neither a revival nor an exercise in nostalgia: it is the living continuation of that tradition. After decades of assimilating Western art, a generation of Chinese — and, in parallel, Indian — artists is returning to its own sources to produce radically contemporary work from its own techniques, materials and concepts.

Paper is the territory where that history is best read. Its technology travelled the Silk Roads — from China to Japan, to Persia, to India — carrying styles, iconographies and philosophies, and weaving a shared cultural continent that runs from shanshui landscape to Mughal miniature. Fragile, intimate, conceived to be unrolled among friends rather than exhibited as monument, paper also proposes another way of looking.

My curatorial work presents this art to European audiences not as exoticism, but as an alternative genealogy of modernity: an invitation to decentre the canon.

Areas of expertise

• Contemporary Chinese inkThe Contemporary Ink Movement, its intellectual genealogy and its protagonists.
• Classical Chinese painting and the origins of abstractionThe shanshui landscape, the literati tradition and the passage from the classical to the modern. MA thesis on Liu Guosong (Liu Kuo-sung), supervised by Dr Anne Farrer (British Museum).
• Asian art on paperIndian and Persian miniature painting; the transmission of paper technology and Buddhist iconography along the Silk Roads; the materiality of paper as a pan-Asian thread.
• Asian philosophies and artistic creationDaoism, Buddhism and Confucianism as frameworks of pictorial practice. Postgraduate training in Buddhist literature and Pali, University of Mumbai (2019).
• The market for contemporary Asian artTwo decades between Beijing and Europe: gallery direction, fairs in China, collection building, advisory and private sales in the secondary market.

Research lines