WANG DONGLING (b.1945) Confrontation of Yin and Yang, 2005WANG DONGLING (b.1945)Confrontation of Yin and Yang, 2005Ink on xuan paper, signed on the lower right, dated 2005.4. 216cm high x 144.8cm wide (85in high x 57in wide). 王冬齡（1945年生）陰陽際會 水墨紙本 鏡框 2005年作Published, Illustrated and Exhibited: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, China Onward: the Estella Collection, Chinese Contemporary Art 1966-2006, Humlebaek, 2007, pp.275-276.Chinese Ink Painting Now, New York, 2010, p.111. Michael Goedhuis, Ink: The Art of China, Saatchi Gallery, London, 2012, pp.86-87.Michael Goedhuis, The Ink Art of China, London, 2019, pp.6-7. 展覽著錄：路易斯安納現代藝術博物館, 《China Onward: the Estella Collection, Chinese Contemporary Art 1966-2006》，胡姆勒拜克，2007年，第275-276頁《當代中國水墨畫》，紐約，2010年，第111頁Michael Goedhuis著，《Ink: the Art of China》， 薩奇美術館，倫敦，2012年，第55頁。pp.86-87Michael Goedhuis著，《水墨中國》，倫敦，2019年，第6-7頁Wang Dongling was born in Jiangsu Province in 1945. When he was 17, he was admitted into the Department of Fine Arts at Nanjing Normal University and studied calligraphy. The classes were interrupted, however, by the Cultural Revolution during the 1960s, but Wang survived the turmoil by writing big-character posters featuring a revolutionary slogan for posting in a public place, a job that ironically provided him with an artistic freedom not available at the university. After the Cultural Revolution, Wang attended the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou and received his MFA degree in 1981; he has taught there (now the China Academy of Art) ever since, and he is currently Vice-Chair of the Calligraphy Department. Wang Dongling's works were influenced by his experience in the United States from 1989 to 1992, when he served as a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota and at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His solid and structural forms are reminiscent in particular of the abstract expressionist painter Franz Kline; for a comparison of Franz Kline's work and Wang Dongling's work, see Ink Worlds: Contemporary Chinese Painting from the Collection of Akiko Yamazaki and Jerry Yang, Stanford, 2018, pp.108-109.Wang began developing a new form of composition that synthesises traditional Chinese aesthetics such as the use of negative space and flying white (feibai; drybrush technique) with abstract expressionist art. Wang's calligraphy pushes it to extreme as they are no longer decipherable Chinese characters, but become purely abstract paintings rather than calligraphy. Wang Dongling has been enormously influential on the whole development of contemporary calligraphy and ink painting. His works have been prominently exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Guggenheim Museum, New York; Yale University Art Gallery, and the Palace Museum, Beijing.