AIKE-DELLARCO is pleased to announce Lui Chun Kwong’s solo exhibition “Lui Chun Kwong: Recent Works” in Shanghai, opening on January 24 and on view until March 5, 2015.
Throughout the time spent in New York and London during the 80’s and the early 90’s, Lui has gained familiarity with the concurrent languages of western art. However it was in 1994 – after his Master of Arts degree from the Goldsmiths’ College of the University of London – that Lui decided to move back to Hong Kong and started focusing on what for him was most important – an investigation into the foundations of painting.
Once settled back in Hong Kong in the early 90’s, Lui Chun Kwong has carried on an extensive investigation into the practice of abstract painting over a span of twenty years. Since then Lui grounded his research on the concept of art as a life habit run by strict discipline and on the belief of painting as a daily practice ruled by a meticulous repetition of a process.
Lui called “Landscape series” his abstract paintings because they aim to capture the primordial forces of Nature within the boundaries of the canvas – being those opposite energies of cause and effect, fragility and roughness, movement and stillness, order and chaos. Every line that the artist draws compresses the visual world that our eye captures with a single eye-blink by reducing it to the essential.
The recent works from the series “Yi Liu Shan Shui”, on show at AIKE-DELLARCO, continue the artist’s reflection on landscape by further exploring those layers of abstraction that have been familiar to Lui’s works over the past twenty years. This marks for the artist a return to his own foundations, where simplicity is sought in the purity of the form – long vertical brushstrokes delivers the emotional attachment to natural elements such as the texture of rocks or the straightness of trees and bamboos. At the same time, warmer shades and new tones redefine the traditional palette of colours and contrast within the same field with the stylistic roughness of the earlier works, creating a connection between past and present, in a context where the accomplishment of every new work is just the beginning of a new one.
Lui Chun Kwong was born in Guangdong, China in 1956, and settled in Hong Kong since 1962. He studied at the Department of Fine Arts of the National Taiwan Normal University and returned to Hong Kong after graduation. He obtained a Master of Arts degree from the Goldsmiths’ College of the University of London in 1994. Lui founded the Hong Kong Modern Art Society of Watercolour with his fellow artists in 1988, and chaired the Society for the first three years. He also served as Chairman of the Hong Kong Visual Art Society from 1988 to 2002. Lui joined the Department of Fine Arts of the Chinese University of Hong Kong from 1985 to 2010, teaching studio courses on Western media, and also supervised M.F.A. Students. Lui Chun Kwong established his Yiliu Painting Factory in 2001, and jointly held its first open studio event with his students in October, which became a prelude to the Fotanian Open Studios series.
