The Brunei Gallery is pleased to announce a retrospective by the celebrated Chinese painter Hong Ling (b.1955). The exhibition follows Hong Ling’s recent retirement from the prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), Beijing, where he taught oil painting since 1987. 

Little of Hong Ling's art survives from the unsettled political era of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) in China. The exhibition begins with a rare work from 1979 and includes other student works from the 1980s, the period of Hong’s training in art colleges in Beijing: these are works from the studio such as nudes and portraits, as well as series of hutong (traditional courtyard) paintings. In the 1990s, following increasing critical and commercial success, Hong began to travel widely and set up a studio residence in the picturesque region of Mount Huangshan in southern Anhui Province, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Since then, Hong Ling has focused exclusively on landscape painting, working in parallel studios devoted to oil and ink painting, while dividing his time between Beijing and Huangshan. Since 1990, Hong Ling's work has also been richly informed by his extensive travels across China, Asia and many remote parts of the world, including the north and south polar regions— experiences documented in his sketchbooks, albums, watercolors and photographs, some of which are included in this retrospective. 

Having undergone a rigorous academic training before becoming a teacher at CAFA, Hong Ling paints landscapes that are technically very rich. This is seen not just in his honed compositions of the wilderness and rigorous handling of pictorial space, but also through the complex layering of paint and effects of opacity and transparency. At the same time, Hong Ling's painting belongs in the lyric, aesthetic tradition of Chinese painting. His works embody personal human experience and values in the ways they echo the dramatic and intense seasonal changes among the high peaks of Huangshan. Hong Ling's is a dignified painting practice in China's scholar-painter tradition of self-cultivation, but it is also provocatively modern and reflexive. These works will have an instinctive appeal for modern audiences as paintings in their own right. Yet, they also tell a story of one artist's personal development, his embrace of the natural world and his spiritual growth, and as such, provide evidence before our eyes of the dramatic social and political changes that have transformed life in China over the last half century. 

A conference to be held in conjunction with the exhibition will explore many topics relating to Hong Ling's practice, from genre issues relevant to landscape art and the current concern with ecology, to concerns with media, colour and technique, as well as posing questions of temporality and place. The conference, Ecologies of Art: A Modern and Contemporary Chinese Art Debate, will be held at SOAS on 23rd–24th September 2016. For further details and to register interest, contact Dr Tian S. Liang (tl6@soas.ac.uk). 

A catalogue edited by the curators Shane McCausland and Tian S. Liang, will be available. A lecture will be given by Professor McCausland prior to the opening of the exhibition, in the Khalili Lecture Theatre at SOAS at 4pm on Thursday 14th July 2016. 

After the SOAS display, the exhibition travels first to the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin (21st October 2016–29th January 2017), and then to the Museum of East Asian Art, Bath (25th February 2017–2nd July 2017). Lenders to the exhibition include the artist, his gallery Soka Art and private collectors. The exhibition and its programme are sponsored by UNEEC Culture and Education Foundation, Taiwan, and by Soka Art.