Symbolic Systems: Notes on Graphic Notation


By Alfonse Chiu

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Graphic Notation is a duo exhibition that examines and problematises understandings of abstraction in contemporary Chinese painting through a comparative study on the works of two Sinophone artists: Wang Yi (b. 1991, Shanghai) and Richard Lin Show Yu (b. 1933, Taichung; d. 2011, Taichung). Seeking to read against the grains of art historiographical methodologies as currently practised across Sinophone academia, media, and museal ecologies, this exhibition marks an attempt to reconsider the extant descriptive lexicons of present-day engagements with abstraction as both artistic form and technical vocabulary in the works of Sinophone artists, especially in contexts of translation for critical, academic, and commercial purposes, where legitimacy is often necessarily identified with genealogies and genealogical affinities, regardless of broader socio-cultural and politico-economic contexts. Instead of repeating and reinforcing common (and empty) descriptions, Graphic Notation embraces a position of strategic alterity where graphic notations, as systems of non-representational signification, are simultaneously a method and metaphor towards abstraction.

For emerging Chinese painter Wang Yi, abstraction emerges as neither an explicit mean nor mode of expression, but rather a more incidental product of his studies on luminosity as a perceptual element within the traditions and ontologies of painting as representational media. Writing on his observations of the relationship between light and shadow in histories of Western European and East Asian painting, Wang locates within what he defined as the “visual ethics” of the two a veneration of “rationality”, “permanence”, and the manifestation of light in the former, and an inclination towards “obscurity”, “breadth”, “depth”, and the “immateriality of shadow” in the latter.

In his own works, Wang deploys traditional glazing techniques drawn from oil painting and ink painting where the patient overlaying of over hundreds of coats of slow and near-transparent layers create an almost uncanny effect of fused and almost indistinguishable colour fields that evoke what he notes as “the ambiguous yet translucent state of seeing in shadow”. By doing so, not only does each application of suspended pigment to a painting surface serve as a physical and quantifiable mark of a cast shadow from each gestural unit of painting itself as action and intention, but it also instantiates an indexical entanglement between luminosity, visibility, and the labour of mark-making that elegantly eludes the pitfalls of assuming authorial agency over a final semiotic production by drawing into view the semantic structure of graphic notations as a referential relationality—albeit one marked by an impish invitation to read deeper into the thingness of thing itself.

Across paintings such as White Shadow (2026, acrylic on canvas, mineral pigment, metal powder, medical powder) and Shirakawa Yōfune (2026, acrylic on canvas, mineral pigment, metal powder, medical powder), geometric colour fields intercalate and intersect across a white background in graphic forms that resemble spectrograms, a visualisation technique used for signal processing where patterns and frequencies of analogue inputs were rendered legible through digital processes. Here, digitality takes on a sly double meaning: though the formwork of Wang’s compositions may mimic graphics produced via digital technology-enabled processes, they are very much the product of manual labour created with the digits of the artist’s hand. An allusion to the often obscured networks of human labour and raw materials behind algorithmic infrastructures, not only do Wang’s compositions trace a socio-technical lineage from the labour of women computers and calculators in early computational systems to the Global South content moderators of present-day digital media economies, they also identify the material processes through which digital imageries are enabled as a set of additive procedures where the layering of different tangible substrates are foundational to the production of these perceptual content.

Meanwhile, for works such as Ksana 2026–1 (2026, acrylic and resin on mirror stainless steel) and Ksana 2026–2 (2026, acrylic and resin on mirror stainless steel), Wang studies the uneasy intersections of artificial and natural radiances through the phenomenon of Cherenkov radiation, which manifests as the characteristic blue glow of underwater nuclear reactors, as a typology of natural light emitted through unnatural means. Across precisely laid out grids, a desaturated mosaic of colours constitute both an almost diagrammatic representation of the gradations of nuclear luminosity and an ominous spectacle of a nuclear explosion on a not-so-distant horizon. In these paintings, Wang’s diagrammatics unfurl with an almost architectural sensibility in his explorations of colour and geometric projection as optical operations as bound to the laws of physics as they are to the calculus of human desires.

Positioned in conversation with Wang’s paintings, select works by the late Taiwanese artist Richard Lin Show Yu extend an alternate trajectory of inquiry into abstraction as visual strategy, grounded in generational contexts. Trained in art and architecture at the former Regent Street Polytechnic (now part of University of Westminster) in London in the Fifties, Lin was a rare East Asian voice active within Euro-American circulations throughout the development of the mid-century Minimalist movement whose practice was characterised by a strict devotion to sparse, geometric compositions that nonetheless revealed certain geocultural affinities across material languages—drawings and paintings with East Asian ink traditions, plastic and metal wall installations with Euro-American modernisms.

Where in earlier works such as Abstract in Green and Gold (1959, oil on canvas) and Work on Paper (1957, oil on paper), Lin appeared to draw on a coarser tactility to mark-making which felt distinctly more emotional despite the relative simplicity of his compositions, later works displayed a more exact and controlled approach. For example, in May 1, May 2, May 3, May 4 (1971, screen prints on paper and acetate), a set of four square planes serves as the representational screen upon which rectangular forms are affixed, bringing to mind, in conjunction with its title, the format and graphic form of the calendar as a diagrammatic instrument for the passage of both time and labour capacity.

Thinking through and with the works of Wang and Lin, Graphic Notation emerges thus as a proposal for an alternate strategy that locates modern and contemporary Chinese abstraction within an expanded and expansive field of technical visual cultures—diagrams, scores, plans, renderings, amongst other genres. Here, compositions of graphic notations themselves serve as the representational field of seemingly objective information and data that nonetheless maintain a distinct aesthetic grammar, and whose hybridities, transmissions, and adoptions through the dispersals of global industrial standards further question and destabilise recurrent cliches of periodisation and attribution in Chinese art-writing, which commonly evokes historicised aesthetic pedigrees without acknowledging their relationships to broader shifts in situated dynamics of social and political transitions. By returning to the fundamental gestures of mark-making as a form of graphic notation, this exhibition seeks to further a reading of the nature of abstraction as symbolic inscriptions undergirding the ideological apparatuses of perception and cognition of present-day social cultures.