“INK Remix” is an exhibition of new Chinese art that brings to the Canberra Museum and Gallery more than 35 works by 14 artists from mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

The very term “ink” is reinterpreted, with one artist making his own ink by boiling down Coca-Cola, in a cheeky tilt at cultural imperialism and Western art.

Another uses tea as ink, and the key image, “Yao’s Journey to Australia” by Yao Jui-chung, is a mischievous work in Biro with a traditional Chinese art background, but a central focus on an elevated map of Australia.

You can expect to see inkjet and lithographic prints, photography, video and animation, too.

And it’s all pretty new. These younger artists (the oldest were born in the ‘60s) grew up with unprecedented exposure to new materials and resources.

Chinese video artist Feng Mengbo recalls being one of the first artists on the mainland to buy a computer in the early 1990s.

Visitors will see ink-art on sculptures, on boots and inside a pair of slippers decorated with erotic images. It’s a sexy show and one CMAG director Shane Breynard correctly sees as one of the gallery’s biggest projects.

One bean curd-hating art critic friend of mine is particularly impressed by Charwei Tsai’s video work “Tofu Mantra”, where you see ink calligraphy on tofu blurring and fading as time goes by, not just a good use of the medium but a nod to the Buddhist and Daoist theme of impermanence.

The “Ink Remix” curator, Sophie McIntyre, has been a Chinese art-watcher since when she lived on the mainland and the 1990s when she researched her PhD on identity politics and cross-strait relations in Taiwanese contemporary art.

Social and artistic change is normal for these rising artists, she says, noting that “when the economy is booming, the arts flourish”.

During earlier times in this post-Cultural Revolution era, overt nationalism may have been to the fore but now, with massive art fairs and biennales sprouting throughout the region, McIntyre believes artists in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan have joined the global village and have concerns for global matters like the environment and generational change.

With four artists from Taiwan, seven from mainland China and three from Hong Kong/Macao, showing “distinctive accents in different regions.”

“Ink Remix: Contemporary art from mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong,” at Canberra Museum and Gallery, until October 18.