Hong Zhu An is a renowned modern ink painter whose artistic career reached a breakthrough in its evolution after he migrated to Singapore in 1993. Before that, he spent a few years as an exile in Australia after leaving China in the late 1980s. Since the 1990s, Hong has become one of the most significant ink painters in the Singapore art scene. This work was painted in 1986 in China and represents the formative stage of his ink art development. The artists adopted wet and heavy ink methods influenced by the modern ink master Li Keran. The work reveals the artist’s intention to explore the unconventional expression that goes beyond the classical and official socialist realist ink paradigms, and this echoes the innovative tendency among many Chinese ink artists in the 1980s.
