Bingyi: Cascade

The Chinese-born artist Bingyi inaugurates the Threshold series with the specially commissioned Cascade, an enormous painting that fills the central wall in the Smart's reception hall in University of Chicago.

Taking over a basketball court in Xuli, a small village in China’s Anhui province, the artist created this beautiful, abstracted black-and-white landscape on massive panels of rice paper which were then shipped to Chicago and attached to the Smart's concave wall using wheat paste. The work draws on the artist's deep knowledge of traditional Chinese landscape painting—Bingyi holds a PhD in art history—as well as contemporary painting techniques. Thought to be the largest rice paper ink painting ever made, it depicts the artist's inner vision of a giant waterfall flowing backward from earth to heaven.