Contemporary Chinese Ink brought together two graduates of the Malaysian Institute of Art’s ink painting programme, Pang Heng Khan and Liew Siow Ching in an exhibition that explored, from markedly different angles, what the classical Chinese ink and brush tradition might hold and yield in a contemporary world. Pang Heng Khan, steeped in the discipline of Chinese calligraphy, turned the medium’s own authority back on itself, blurring the stroke to express the cultural disorientation of the overseas Chinese, layering dragon emblems and dui lien, the couplets that adorn the thresholds of Chinese households, against calligraphic compositions that juxtapose the hands and periods of poets across centuries, using tradition’s own keys to unlock a modern state of mind. Liew Siow Ching set her sights in a different direction entirely, pressing the ink and brush into the textures and pressures of contemporary urban life: in her Flourish City series, the Chinese character for ‘car’ (che) proliferates across the picture plane in myriad directions, conjuring the density and momentum of a city in motion, while her apartment works reimagine the high-rise flat through the poetic lens of the birdcage.