b. 1946, Singapore. Family from Wenchang, Hainan. Lives in Hong Kong.
Wong Sun Ming
王新明
A method from the eleventh century, a medium from Europe, 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
The method
Mi dots, in oil
In the eleventh century the scholar-painter 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. The method 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. It is not a quotation and not a pastiche: the dots do the structural work they were invented to do, in a material Mi Fu never saw. In the harvest fields not one stalk is drawn. The ground is assembled from thousands of small touches of gold, green and violet, and the distance is held not by perspective lines but by the dots themselves cooling and thinning as they go back.
The Hong Kong subjects are the clearest case. A hill above a bay, a harbour at first light — a Chinese city of the twentieth century, seen through a Chinese method of the eleventh, in a European medium.
