Hong Wai

A Shanghai‐born 'trans-media' artist, based in Macau and Paris.

She creates elegant landscaping ink paintings that combines classical Chinese painting with a modern feminist twist. Hong Wai has exhibited worldwide including in Sotheby's Gallery in Hong Kong, Art Stage Singapore, Art Taipei exhibition throughout Paris, Zurich, New York, Miami and Montréal.

Landscape painting is regarded as the highest form of art in Chinese culture, but is, traditionally, a solely male playing field. These landscape masterpieces are imperial China’s official art collection from the Five Dynasties (907 AD) to modern times. The collection of landscape paintings aimed to illustrate the splendid images of the imperial country. The work of Hong Wai testifies a new kind of Chinese landscaping art. She transports Chinese ink into the contemporary art scene, unleashing the mysterious, often hidden, feminine perspective through a technique that has been confined by masculine universe for centuries.

This exhibition shares Hong Wai’s two latest creations of painting series: “Feminine Landscape” and “Moonlights”.

In “Feminine Landscape" female bodies with lingerie are placed in a traditional Chinese landscape composition. Her mountain and water landscapes become interlaced lingerie; the ode to heaven and earth become a sonnet to sensuous, hidden and inescapable “yin”. Hong Wai is imparting a new degree of sensuality to intricate and lace the "mysterious female” into a contemporary view of Taoism.

In “Moonlight" the drawings depict silvery moonlight shedding in the dark and together with the effect of the foggy mist, an atmosphere for a quiet night meditation is generated. Hong Wai uses fine and intricate linearity to illustrate the grains and textures many variances of trees as observed in nature. She utilises a small ink brush to draw these lines; line by line, grain by grain, meticulously with patience and total focus and attention.

Hong Wai’s work based on compositions of all these delicate and fine lines have apparently emitted touches of elegance. Her extraordinary skills together with her cross‐cultural characteristics and heritage, makes her unique and influencing in this stream of contemporary art.