Revivals of Chinese Traditions in “Uniquely Hong Kong – A Celebration of Hong Kong Art”

All great cities are born from the energetic admixture of international trade and cultural influences. The exhibition of 28 artists at Alisan Fine Arts, “Uniquely Hong Kong – A Celebration of Hong Kong Art,” looked back on how today’s Special Administrative Region came to be one of those cosmopolitan destinations, producing a distinctive visual culture that revived Chinese traditions in the second half of the 20th century. 

Many of the artists who arrived in the British colony to escape the brutal civil war of the 1940s and political purges of newly communist China in the ’50s had been trained in traditional ink painting and brought with them their conservative cultural sensibilities. Among this founding generation were the ink painters Lui Shou-kwan (1919–75), Irene Chou (1924–2011), and Fang Zhaoling (1914–2006), who were highlighted in a dedicated space in the exhibition. Lui, who arrived from Guangzhou in 1948 and went on to establish the New Ink Movement, revealed that modernist notions of abstraction could be boldly reinterpreted through ink in a balance of tradition and innovation in works such as Lotus (1968), a vertical rendering of a single red bulb above wide horizontal strokes of black ink. An émigré from Shanghai, Chou applied a deeply spiritual approach to Liu’s modernist credo, developing a singular style that far surpassed any of the avant-garde patriarchs of her generation (or subsequent ones) in originality, as was evident in the brooding composition around a series of loosely splattered brushstrokes, The Universe in My Heart, My Heart is the Universe II (2001). In contrast, Fang, arriving from Wuxi in 1950, hewed most closely to the conventions of landscape painting, working in the neoclassical tradition of her mentor, Zhang Daqian, as seen her in romanticized landscape Sailing Under the Red Sunset (1998).

The second clique of Hong Kong artists were those either born or raised in the colony such as Hon Chi Fun (1922–2019), who co-founded the all-male Circle Art Group, as well as Lui’s students Wucius Wong, Pat Hui, and Chui Tze-Hung. Abstraction dominates in the selections at Alisan from this generation, including Chui’s Collage to Juxtapose (2020) and Writing Wrongs and Rights (2020), which pair calligraphic and gestural marks; Hui and Wong’s Asking about Spring Messages by the Lake (2005), with the latter’s renderings of Tang and Song dynasty poems on the former’s colorfield ground; Hon’s Spell of Space (1994) featuring bold horizontal brushings; and Fung Ming Chip’s ultra-minimal trio Sailing Under the Stars / Waterfall / Sailing in the Moonlight (2017). All of these artists left Hong Kong in the decades before the 1997 Handover, though Wong, Chui, and Hon eventually returned.