After viewing the recent exhibition Vaulting Limits with works by Cao Jigang, Lin Yan, Wei Jia, Xiao Bing, and Yuan Zuo at the Tenri Cultural Institute, New York, Robert C. Morgan reflects on the development of ink painting among contemporary Chinese painters.

Morgan writes "I am taken by the fact that many artists are seemingly less concerned with Western formulas, Pop and Expressionism among them, and are focusing instead on developing ways of working with more traditional materials including ink, brushes, and xuan paper. Some Western observers have misconstrued this revival as regressive, which I believe is incorrect. Rather, many contemporary Chinese ink and brush painters are striving to rediscover their own language and, in doing so, reinvent the vanishing medium by bringing it back into the foreground of a renewed, present-day cultural awareness."