Wu Yiming Solo Exhibition: B-Side Ink ｜Eli Klein Gallery
2026-02-28 16:44

Location: 398 West Street, New York
Exhibition Dates: March 8, 2025 – May 17, 2025
Opening Reception: March 8, 2025 (Saturday) 18:00–20:00
Artist: Wu Yiming

Eli Klein Gallery is honored to present the upcoming solo exhibition B-Side Ink by Chinese artist Wu Yiming. This marks his first solo exhibition at Eli Klein Gallery as well as in New York, showcasing his latest works and signifying an important turning point in his exploration of ink art. The exhibition includes works on paper, cardboard, and collage, demonstrating how the artist engages in a profound dialogue between tradition and contemporaneity through the cultural and social meanings of materials.

Wu Yiming relocated from Shanghai to New York in 2020, a transition that has profoundly influenced his practice. As a highly skilled ink painter and scholar, he is rooted in ink traditions while incorporating the complex context of American Pop Art, juxtaposing and iterating his experiences of Eastern and Western cultures.

Ink art emphasizes the precision and irreversibility of the “moment,” while Pop Art is built upon reproduction and dissemination. These two seemingly contradictory artistic systems intertwine in Wu Yiming’s works. He places the restraint of Eastern ink alongside the extroversion of Western Pop, seeking a subtle balance between reverence and playfulness through subjects such as portraiture and still life.

Wu Yiming’s works move between tradition and modernity, East and West. Through brush, ink, and material, he constructs a visual world that is both familiar and strange, allowing viewers to drift across cultural boundaries and reflect on the era and environment in which they exist.

“Portraits are highly legible. Compared to understanding the content of other artworks, the complexity of human figures is the easiest to convey.” — Wu Yiming

Highlights

The Flower Smile Series

In the realm of portraiture, Wu Yiming skillfully merges Eastern and Western visual symbols, combining the iconic image of the Mona Lisa with the Buddhist gesture of the “flower-holding smile” to create the five works of the Flower Smile series. These portraits are encircled by halos, seeking a delicate balance between blurred cultural origins and identity. The works carry the quiet wisdom of Eastern philosophy while subtly hinting at contemporary cultural irony, demonstrating Wu Yiming’s fluid artistic expression between tradition and modernity, the individual and the world.

The Banana Series

Wu Yiming’s Banana series explores the absurdity of consumerism through distinctive visual tension. Created on cardboard, the banana appears suspended between motion and stillness, as if just tossed into the air yet also lying motionless on the ground. This contradictory depiction imbues the works with humor and depth, while reflecting the artist’s contemplation of the transience of the material world.

In the Banana series, Wu Yiming raises profound questions through humor: when the value of a commodity is exhausted through consumption, does its meaning also disappear? These works not only respond to the visual language of Pop Art, but also offer a sharp critique of contemporary consumption patterns, revealing the artist’s keen insight into tradition and contemporaneity, as well as Eastern and Western cultures.

“Bananas are very common and inexpensive, and cardboard is too. Easy to obtain, easy to discard. I would very much like to lower the posture of art.” — Wu Yiming

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Related Artists: WU YIMING 邬一名