Detail: The exhibition brings together three significant series that span the artist’s career—Celestial Tales, The Milky Way, and Kunlun—juxtaposed to form a sustained dialogue. Taking ink as its conceptual and material foundation, the exhibition systematically traces Tai’s artistic inquiry into cosmological thought, material elements, and pictorial traditions, articulating his sustained engagement with the transformation of ink painting in a contemporary context.

Rooted in ancient Chinese cosmology and the historiography of landscape painting (shan shui), Tai Xiangzhou’s practice engages in parallel with contemporary scientific discourse. Rather than pursuing a mimetic representation of the natural world, Tai interrogates the internal pictorial structures, spatial logic, and metaphysical principles that underlie the Chinese landscape tradition, using them as a framework through which to articulate an understanding of cosmic order. Through three closely related series, the exhibition unfolds as a cumulative and stratified viewing experience.

Taken together, these works reveal Tai Xiangzhou’s practice as one that does not seek to reconcile tradition and the contemporary, but rather treats tradition as an active, generative framework. By repositioning ink painting as a site of cosmological inquiry and material experimentation, Under Heaven and Beyond Form: Celestial Tales of Tai Xiangzhou foregrounds ink not as a historical medium, but as an evolving system of thought capable of engaging both ancient philosophy and contemporary modes of understanding the universe.