Image: Ming Ren and Dr. Hansong Zhang, Dance with Ink, 2024. Interactive projection. Software file courtesy of the artist
At the Honolulu Museum of Art, the exhibition ‘Vital Connections: Art & the Brain’ includes an installation in which visitors set ink in motion with their own bodies. ‘Dance with Ink’ (2024) is an interactive projection by the painter Ming Ren, made with his longtime collaborator Dr. Hansong Zhang, a scientist and engineer based in Silicon Valley.
Visitors stand in front of a projection drawn from Ren’s ink imagery. Motion sensors track their movements and pass the data to custom software, which does not play back a fixed animation but uses computational fluid dynamics, a method for simulating the movement of liquids, to make the virtual ink respond. Each gesture sends the ink into swirling patterns that differ from one participant to the next and last only as long as the encounter. For the Honolulu presentation, Ren added ambient sound that he calls ‘sunset beach music’, which plays while a visitor moves and stops when the interaction ends.
The projection takes its imagery from ‘Sunset Beauty’ (2023), an ink painting of the Hawaiian coastline at dusk that hangs in the exhibition alongside an earlier work, ‘Surge of Life’ (2009). Ren began the series after a visit to Hawai‘i in 2023, when he came to Honolulu for the museum’s exhibition of Hung Liu’s work and spent more than a week travelling across O‘ahu and Hawai‘i Island, from the coral reefs of O‘ahu’s North Shore to the Kīlauea caldera.
Born in China in 1956, Ren has spent more than four decades as both a painter and a teacher of painting while developing a contemporary approach to ink. He works between Hangzhou and a studio in the Bay Area. His fluid compositions draw on ink wash painting and the energy of Chinese calligraphy, and he says he paints almost every day without planning a composition in advance. Working with scientists, he explains, lets him join his images to their technology and arrive at a new way of expressing feeling.
Curated by Catherine Whitney, HoMA’s director of curatorial affairs, ‘Vital Connections’ looks at how creativity and immersive sensory experiences can support memory, learning and cognitive well-being. Developed with clinicians and neuroscientists from Honolulu’s Brain Health Applied Research Institute, it brings together around twenty artists, among them Ruth Asawa, Chuck Close, David Hockney, Yayoi Kusama and Georgia O’Keeffe, drawn from the museum’s collection, recent acquisitions and loans.
According to Whitney, Ren is highly attentive to how audiences experience his work and wanted visitors to engage with it actively rather than simply look.
