Image size: 54.0 x 53.1 cm
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 exemplifies the artist’s typical style in the 1990s when he settled in Singapore. Within this simplified geometrical composition, the artist applied colour pigments layer by layer to add tonal richness, solidness, and subtlety to the pictorial surface and highlight the materiality of the painting medium. Although the pictorial schema may remind the audience of the colour field painting in the modernist abstraction movement, the colours and textural treatments are inspired by ancient artefacts, including ceramics and bronze vessels, in the Chinese decorative and applied art traditions and remain significant resources for the construction of the artist’s formal language. The calligraphic strokes are treated as a key subject in the composition. The artist purposely limited the spontaneity of ink brushwork to emphasise the disciplined elegance embodied in the calligraphic manner.
