Lauded Chinese ink artist Shao Fan on his journey and seeking ‘a sense of presence’

Beijing-based artist Shao Fan’s first memories of Chinese aesthetics are linked to his grandmother’s stories – and her wardrobe. It was a sensory oasis in a bleak landscape. At the time, China was drained of colour, swept by the Cultural Revolution’s campaign against the “Four Olds” that sought to eradicate all traces of tradition. His grandmother would open drawers and unfold clothes, lay out accessories and let the past breathe for a moment in secret. Decades on, Shao has become one of the most celebrated contemporary Chinese ink artists, moving fluidly between sculpture, furniture-making and interior design. He has even designed Beijing siheyuan courtyard houses and gardens. Until late June, he presents simultaneous shows at two prestigious galleries: Mirrored Gardens at Vitamin Creative Space in Guangzhou, in China’s Guangdong province, and “Refrain” at White Cube Mason’s Yard in London. Shao’s Guangzhou exhibition, “The Nature of Things”, is a concise survey of two of his best-known bodies of work: his ink paintings on rice paper and his sculptural furniture pieces. Oil painting and Western influences Shao may be known as an ink artist, but he was consumed by oil painting long before he ever picked up a maobi (ink brush). He never formally studied the medium, but both his parents taught Soviet-style painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, and would bring home catalogues of Western avant-garde artists that spellbound him with their chaotic, subversive pieces. “Even today, I still admire Francis Bacon – his genius for bringing out psychological intensity, even though he is the complete opposite of who I am as an artist,” Shao says, adding that artists such as Gerhard Richter had a profound influence on him. In 1989, Shao, then aged 25, painted Cradle, which he considers his first serious oil painting. Rendered with visceral realism, the work reveals a young artist deeply attuned to the social tensions in China at the time and the political anxieties of his generation. But a turning point was coming. As China’s economy gained momentum in the subsequent decade, a bustling antique market began to emerge. “Markets for old furniture started popping up all around Beijing,” Shao says. His father had been quietly collecting classic Ming-style furniture since the 1950s, so these markets immediately caught Shao’s eye. “I travelled to Hebei [in northeastern China] once and was astonished by the sheer quantity of furniture there,” he says. “They were Ming-style, but they weren’t made of expensive woods like Zitan or rosewood – just cheap timber.” He bought 30 chairs from a local dealer on the spot and took them back to his studio in 1995. What interested Shao was not simply preserving traditional Chinese furniture, but reimagining it through the lens of modernism. “When we study modernism, we are not trying to imitate a particular style, but to understand the underlying ideas,” he says. “So I restructured these chairs until they were neither sculpture nor traditional furniture. What emerged was something paradoxical, but still in a state of equilibrium.” Visitors to “The Nature of Things” are afforded a selective view of the evolution of this body of work across three decades. At first, defective, old Ming-style chairs are dissected, sliced down and suspended together using sheer acrylic boards. Eventually, Shao stopped using antique furniture altogether. Instead, he began fabricating entirely original sculptures featuring Ming-style contours, abstract shapes or surreal references to body parts such as vertebrae or eyelashes. Works from the series have made it into the collections of major institutions, including Centre Pompidou in Paris and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, establishing Shao as a pioneer at the nexus of design and contemporary art. Despite this, he has slowed his output to perhaps a single major sculpture per year. Shao’s move into traditional ink But Shao never stopped pushing the boundaries of traditional Chinese aesthetics, and over time his approach to oil painting quietly shifted: his palette grew increasingly monochromatic, as though the work was moving towards something more austere. Ultimately, it was the form of a rabbit that convinced Shao to move into traditional ink. “I had been wanting to paint with ink for a very long time, but I felt I needed to wait until I deeply understood the root of Chinese aesthetics to do it justice,” he says. “By then, I realised I had finally developed my own distinct vocabulary. I thought, why not try it with ink?” The decision was not without resistance. In the early 2010s, his oil rabbit paintings were selling well, and the gallery representing him worried collectors might not follow him into a new medium. Shao went ahead anyway and his defiance paid off. The ink paintings have since become his most sought-after, creating a market frenzy exemplified by his auction record at Christie’s Hong Kong in May 2022, where one of his rabbit ink paintings fetched HK$2,394,000 (around US$305,000). Shao’s “Refrain” solo exhibition at White Cube Mason’s Yard marks his debut with the gallery following the announcement of his representation in 2025. It positions him alongside newly signed global heavyweights such as Cai Guo-qiang, and coincides with news that the Tate is preparing its first major exhibition dedicated to contemporary ink art in 2027. According to Susan May, global artistic director of White Cube, Shao’s work stands out “paradoxically for its quietude … and is aware of temporal consciousness in a way that speaks to audiences both in the East and West”. May recalls first encountering one of Shao’s paintings of a cabbage at Art Basel Hong Kong. She says the work immediately stood amid the “clamour and noise” of the fair because of its ability to transform “a humble subject” into something of “profound beauty and complexity”. Today, Shao is an international presence at a moment when ink paintings are attracting growing market attention. White Cube sells his paintings for between US$80,000 and US$640,000, depending on the scale. On June 12, Shao broke his auction record with a painting offered on Fair Warning, an invite-only online auction platform. In the Name of the Rabbit – Back to the Light (2019) fetched US$432,000, 23 per cent above the high estimate. The auction was curated by Beijing-based collector Michael Xufu Huang, marking the platform’s first-ever collaboration with a third party since its launch in 2020. Fair Warning was founded by Loic Gouzer, a former star auctioneer at Christie’s. When asked about landing a coveted spot on a global blue-chip roster, Shao admits with characteristic equanimity that luck plays a part – though he adds with a wry smile that major recognition has historically arrived a decade later for him than for his contemporaries. Such milestones, however, seem far from Shao’s mind. Lately, he has been preoccupied with the vernacular forms and craftsmanship of jade artefacts from the Neolithic Liangzhu civilisation. The painstaking process behind their creation reminds him of the Covid-19 lockdowns, when he would spend as many as 15 hours a day alone in his studio. “Those jades were polished over and over again,” he says. “It was a kind of long-termism. The result is a sense of presence. That state is what I want for myself.” “Shao Fan: Refrain”, White Cube Mason’s Yard, London. Until June 27. “Shao Fan: The Nature of Things”, Mirrored Gardens, Guangzhou. Until June 28.

Lauded Chinese ink artist Shao Fan on his journey and seeking ‘a sense of presence’

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Shao talks about early inspiration and moving from oil to sculpture to ink as two exhibitions in London and Guangzhou highlight his works

Oil painting and Western influences

Shao talks about early inspiration and moving from oil to sculpture to ink as two exhibitions in London and Guangzhou highlight his works