The show and accompanying program – including a symposium with well-known experts in the field, guided tours and a film series – showcase works by young artists living and working in Beijing and, at the same time, highlight the diverse artistic practices in that city today.

The curatorial team comprises Guo Xiaoyan – one of China’s best known curators, at present at the Minsheng Art Museum and previously Chief Curator at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art – as well as Berlin curators Thomas Eller (former Director of the Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin) and Andreas Schmid. Together, they visited over 50 ateliers in Beijing’s 798 Art Zone, Cao Chang Di, Hei Qiao and Song Zhuang to select the works for "The 8 of Paths". The exhibition’s title not only evokes the lucky number 8 in the Chinese tradition, but also their own curatorial journey as they explored the paths of discovery through Beijing’s varied landscape of artistic approaches.

The legendary "China Avantgarde" exhibition held in 1993 in Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt is regarded as the first of its kind in Europe. This exhibition also co-organized by Andreas Schmid, co-curator of "The 8 of Paths", jump started an interest in Chinese contemporary art in the West. Building on that tradition "The 8 of Paths" spotlights leading current positions and profiles a new generation of artists who, thanks in part to the older generation around Ai Weiwei, have acquired quite new possibilities and freedoms over the past years.

Xiaoyun Chen - Colin Chinnery - Lu Fang - Xiao GUAN - Xiangyu He - Qingtai Hu - Xuan Kan - Hui Li - Ran Li - Liu Chuang - Xun SUN - Sishun Wang - Wei WANG - Xing YAN - Junling Yang - Honglei YU - Zhao Zhao - Yu Zhu - Binyuan Li - Wei LIU - Song Lu - [Sun Yuan *1972 & Peng Yu *1973] Sun & Peng - [Deng Dafei & He Hai] Deng & He - Utopia Group -
Curator Andreas Schmid - Thomas Eller - Xiaoyan GUO -

The first major exhibition of Chinese contemporary art ever mounted by the Metropolitan, Ink Art explores how contemporary works from a non-Western culture may be displayed in an encyclopedic art museum. Presented in the Museum's permanent galleries for Chinese art, the exhibition features artworks that may best be understood as part of the continuum of China's traditional culture. These works may also be appreciated from the perspective of global art, but by examining them through the lens of Chinese historical artistic paradigms, layers of meaning and cultural significance that might otherwise go unnoticed are revealed. Ultimately, both points of view contribute to a more enriched understanding of these artists' creative processes.

Featuring some seventy works by thirty-five artists in various media—paintings, calligraphy, photographs, woodblock prints, video, and sculpture—created during the past three decades, the exhibition is organized thematically into four parts: The Written Word, New Landscapes, Abstraction, and Beyond the Brush. Although all of the artists have challenged, subverted, or otherwise transformed their sources through new modes of expression, Ink Art seeks to demonstrate that China's ancient pattern of seeking cultural renewal through the reinterpretation of past models remains a viable creative path.

Jie-chang Yang - Yongliang YANG - Dong SONG - Donling Wang - ShanZhuan WU - Huan ZHANG - Bing Xu - Weiwei AI - Wenda GU - Zhijie QIU - Jian Ren - Dan Liu - Guorui Shi - Danwen XING - Lijun FANG - FuDong YANG - AnXiong Qiu - Yu Zhang - Guo-Qiang CAI - Yong-Ping Huang - Jian-Jun Zhang - Jin WANG - Shaoxiong CHEN - Jianyu DUAN - Hao HONG - Yan HUANG - Huasheng Li - Wei LIU - Shi-hua Qui - Fan SHAO - Xun SUN - Tiande Wang - Fanzhi Zeng - Wang ZHAN - Ming-Chip FUNG -
Curator Maxwell K. Hearn -