Artist Uses Rollerblades to Ink Traditional Chinese Paintings

Artist Tian Haisu is putting a calorie-burning art form to the ancient test of landscape painting. “Landskating” integrates her passion for ice skating with traditional Chinese inking. For each piece in her Landskating series, Haisu steps onto a xuan paper rink with inline skates loaded with toe-fulls of ink, and skates out her black-and-white vistas.

Haisu creates contrast with pauses and jumps, textures with toe taps, and emphasis by skating back and forth, giving a unique breadth to each work. On the whole, her work portrays nature in stark monochrome and on a large-scale—her most recent piece, Blood-Line-Land, stretches a whopping 43′ by 20′.

“My whole body is involved and I produce all kinds of ink landscapes, such creation is full of power, speed and rhythm,” Haisu explains on CCC Gallery’s site. “Though it is separated from the traditional technique of the painting brush, the vitality of traditional ink landscapes remains. I am so passionate about ink landscaping because it shows very rich emotions by means of simple forms.”

Watch the artist in action, skating her latest and largest work to date Blood-Line-Land, along with a selection of her other Landskating works, below:

Landskating No. 14, Tian Haisu, via

Landskating No. 7, Tian Haisu, via

Landskating No. 4, Tian Haisu, via

Landskating No. 11, Tian Haisu, via

Landskating No. 1, Tian Haisu, via

Via Oddity Central

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