Shanghai artist Cai Xiaosong has taken his exquisite ink depictions of rocks to an ongoing New York exhibition entitled The Chinese Scholar: Ink Paintings and Works of Art.

The exhibition is part of Asia Week 2012, a collaborative project among Asian art specialists, galleries, five auction houses and 17 museums, as well as Asian cultural institutions in the metropolitan New York area, running through March 24.

The 47-year-old, who began as a traditional landscape artist but now focuses on portraits of rocks, a favorite collectable genre for ancient scholars, considers the rocks to be “the essence of Chinese landscape art”.

Ranked among the world’s earliest abstract sculptures, Chinese scholars’ rocks are complex and often bizarre natural formations. They have been collected and admired for more than 1,000 years, Cai said.