The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture presents The Poet’s Brush: Chinese Ink Paintings by Lo Ch’ing, on display February 1 through March 17. The exhibition features paintings by Lo Ch’ing, a Chinese poet-painter who creates art simultaneously rooted in tradition and expressive of contemporary sensibility. His works describe a path between the strong currents of his own short past, the millennia-old past of the Chinese empire, and the demands of today’s postindustrial, consumer-driven and individualist global citizen.

The exhibition, curated by University of Maryland professor Jason Kuo, comprises 30 artworks and represents the artist’s first show in the United States in ten years. Representing four decades of the artistic activity, the selection of works ranges from smaller, poetic compositions of the late 1960s to monumental, post -modern landscapes of 2015. Working in the millennia -old tradition of Chinese ink art, Lo’s paintings include familiar landscape forms of the genre, such as mountains, clouds and river scenes, but he updates this hallowed pictorial language with his own idiosyncratic vocabulary—one that includes an array of modern symbols like airplanes, icons, asphalt and skyscrapers—and aerial views impossible in ancient times.

Critically acclaimed both in Taiwan and China for his painting and his poetry, Lo Ch’ing’s works have been shown internationally at venues such as the Saatchi Art Gallery and the British Museum in London.

Alfreda Murck, author of Poetry and Painting in Song China, The Subtle Art of Dissent and previous Associate Curator of Asian Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present a lecture on the work of Lo Ch’ing on March 7, 4-5:30 p.m. Learn more here.

Learn more about this exhibit and other arts and culture opportunities at UMBC here.

Pictured above: The sun and the moon of the Peach Blossom Spring, 2015, ink on paper