b. 1946, Singapore. Family from Wenchang, Hainan. Lives in Hong Kong.
Wong Sun Ming
王新明
Yixiang — a thousand-year-old method, European oil, sixty years of looking.
- LineageOnly studio disciple of Hu Shanyu (1909–1993)
- TrainedChina Academy of Art, Hangzhou, 1985
- PrefacesQuan Shanshi, China Academy of Art
- PublishedTwo collected volumes, 1992 and 2010
- WritingCriticism and academic essays, Hong Kong press, from 1986
- Working1992 to 2025, seven series, all under one idea
The idea
Yixiang 意象
Every series here carries the same word: 意象, yixiang. It is old vocabulary in Chinese poetics — the point at which a feeling and a thing seen become inseparable, so that the image is not a description of the world but a state of mind that happens to have a shape. A painter working in yixiang is not recording the Li River. He is painting what the Li River does to him, and the river is how it becomes visible.
The method that carries it comes from the eleventh century. Mi Fu gave up outline: rather than draw the edge of a hill he built it from accumulated horizontal dots, varying their density and their wetness until the form emerged from atmosphere alone. It passed to his son Mi Youren and became one of the enduring idioms of Chinese landscape.
Wong applies that thousand-year-old logic to oil paint, and then carries it well past landscape — into plum blossom, into a vase of flowers, into a sun over snow. In the fields before the village not one stalk is drawn. The ground is assembled from thousands of small touches, and the distance is held not by perspective lines but by the dots themselves cooling and thinning as they go back.
