Ink on Canvas, video installation, 2000

A video-installation that Zheng Shengtian contributed to the exhibition Word and Meaning: Six Contemporary Chinese Artists at SUNY Buffalo and Ohio University in 2000-2001. Using Clement Greenberg’s canonical essay “Modernist Painting” as text, Zheng made a video of his wife Aikang writing in ink on canvas accompanied by a soundtrack of the Canadian artist Hank Bull reading the essay. As a result of the incompatibility of the water-based ink and the prepared surface of the canvas, the ink marks shrank until only a pattern of irregular dots remained, reminiscent of an abstract painting. The gradual deprivation of Greenberg’s words of meaning in the process of painting re-enacted the historical progress of Modernist Reductionism that Greenberg believed to be inevitable.