Land, Water, Paper & Ink

ART LABOR is pleased to show a series of new ink paintings by Shanghai based French artist Alexandrine Dévé. Ms Dévé lived a part of her young life in China with her parents who were based in Beijing and Guangzhou at the end of the 1980’s and early 1990’s. While living in China she studied “gongbi” ink painting with master painters such as Ao GongLiang, amongst others.

She has taken her initial traditional Chinese art training and personalized it, creating a series of works based on modern social phenomemon, such as immigration, and globalization while utilizing techniques with brush work and traditional skill of ink and water manipulation. Like an expressive atlas, these paintings of world maps use brush stroke and the push of the ink barriers to demonstrate the flow of populations, to highlight the geo-political strengths and weaknesses, and to finally drive home the notion that such as ink easily flows across the seams and crinkles of rice paper, so too are the fluid and interconnected borders of our world.