Calling Forth the Mountain Peaks and Words

Hong Ling is well known for utilizing western painting technique in the realization of eastern art. The way in which he combines new and old allows Hong to focus his inner sensory experiences and extend them infinitely outwards into the natural world, re-crafting individual scenes through hearing, sight, touch, smell and taste.

Some have described Hong’s landscapes as reminiscent of the female body; the layers of misty whiteness covering luscious pinkness, the green buds faintly shimmering behind the branches, Hong against a powerful brown rocky mountain-face. This is the skin on the back of a woman’s neck where it meets with the hairline, the ever so slight dryness of her lips on first waking, the shallow alluring valley tracing her spine, a woman breathing; the dampness of her breath.

Others have suggested that Hong ’s scenes are best understood as representations of taste; an all consuming thick eggplant purple, the strip of skin-like whiteness in the corners, the black lines that explode from the bottom of the work. This is the fragrant aroma that wafts from the kitchen when cooking, the lingering odor of make-up just-removed, around a dressing table, the smell of fine sand on the Kenting coast.

Hong Ling magnifies his senses to experience the purest beauty, using his own body to write or deconstruct everyday scenes. He tears away the representational forms of scenes and infuses them with spatial flow, the interplay of light and shade and the dissemination of tastes and smells. This is why some critics have likened Hong’s paintings to the weather, texture, distance and the wind. Whereas Jackson Pollock dug things from the depths of his subconscious and represented his pain on canvas, Hong Ling’s works focus on his own culture and reflect a point of view that is essentially comfortable with life. We do not look at his paintings as landscapes but more a rejection of refinement.

Great Art Transcends Genres and Leads to a Revolution in Thinking --- by Takashi Murakami, Theory of Artistic Creativity 

In his creative work Hong Ling departs from traditional ideas of scenes. Starting with realism he embraced freehand brushwork and then moved in the direction of image expressionism. Hong explored the boundaries between Chinese painting and oil painting in a way that is born of nature and resonates with the human heart. Between body and function, he launched a revolution in media and theme that bestrides Chinese and Western cultures, creating artistic rules which, though rooted in tradition, are more laid-back and freehand.

Hong Ling’s creative focus and rich background in Chinese culture were two of the factors behind his success at the Venice Biennial in 1997 and such international renown has solidified his artistic standing. As part of his continued pursuit of art, Hong seeks out commonality in heterogeneity and divergence in commonality to showcase his artistic spirit. With his revolutionary vitality, overlapping subject matter and creative use of media, Hong Ling is transformed into an artistic master calling forth mountain peaks and words.