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An afternoon with Wong Yan-kwai
"No one dares to paint anymore. Above all, one must understand . . . one must not remain outside the landscape. When Cézanne painted Sainte Victoire Mountain, it wasn't Sainte Victoire that he painted, it was his own inner mountain . . . "
Wong Yan-kwai
Wong Yan-kwai is a consummate painter, a fact that does not prevent him from also working with sculpture, photography, video and postal art. He occupies a very special place in the Hong Kong art scene, in the sense that most other Hong Kong artists situate their work within the social context that springs from a close connection with the local urban environment. Wong Yan-kwai, on the other hand, is engaged in a more personal and demanding quest for what lies at the very heart of the creative artistic process itself: a man facing the world both spiritually and bodily, he attempts to make visible that which is invisible to everyone else. The artist conducts this struggle with his hand, within the narrow space that separates it from the canvas. This is not merely a conceptual or intellectual battle, it is more that that. It is actually like hand to hand combat, a physical struggle with colours, the paint, light and the canvas or paper. The result is a work of art that exists in its own right that has no need for concepts or words to express itself; it is a work of art, to use the poet Paul Valery’s words, "to which the artist brings his body".
With no art schools to speak of and attracted by the promise of adventure, Wong Yan-kwai is one of those artists who left Hong Kong at the beginning of the 70s to both travel and get an education. His destination: Paris, the 'old world' in search of the 'sacred city'. "One day during the summer of 1973, while all the headlines announced the death of Bruce Lee, I found myself sitting in a narrow airplane seat, a bit nervous but happy like when I skipped classes as a child but this time it was to travel 13,000 km to go study art in Paris. Why Paris? I really wasn't sure. People said France was the Mecca of the art world and I believed them". Paris may not have been what he expected but the six years he spent there would "open his eyes". These instructive years were spent in a variety of studios and eventually distinguished by his finding his path in painting.
"Before I left Hong Kong, I thought I was already a good painter with a fairly broad knowledge of the art. When I arrived in France, however, I couldn't understand what I saw. Why were these people painting this way? In Hong Kong, my teachers had taught me to paint in the same vein, they spoke of technique but they didn't teach me this language I saw in France". I had to start over completely. Everything I had been taught and knew about art to that point had nothing to do with the art of painting. The art of painting entails being able to find and then bring out the spirit of the object or person you are looking at."
As is the case with any young artist, he had to find himself. In Zavaro's studio at the Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux Arts (Fine Arts School) in Paris, he transformed shapes, softened lines, but was still dissatisfied. "A year later, I found that there was something missing from my work, a kind of energy". He then discovered something at the Beaubourg, "The best teacher I had was a painting by Kandinsky, an untitled painting. It was square and bursting with colour and line. I was immediately struck by a great power emanating from it.
I also really liked Chagall, who painted poetry with his brushes, but what I was looking for was something even purer. I wanted to find that place devoid of meaning, history or narrative where the painting communicates directly with the eye, representing only itself. I then discovered Willem de Kooning; that was close to what I had in mind.
Wong Yan-kwai has remained loyal to his challenging pursuit. Colour is his primary material; it makes up the structure, form and movement of his work. Bright and strong, his colours overlap, contrast, beckon and push against each other producing a strong musical resonance that keeps them in constant movement. His work is constant creation and destruction in motion. These highly charged paintings leave a strong impression on the viewer. One can sometimes see a familiar object among the many forms that make up his work, such as an airplane or fish, but they have been partially altered, losing their shape, identity and nature. The painter has recreated them by making them into simple "colour-objects" with which he plays liberally on the canvas.
"For quite a long time", he says "I modified all recognizable objects for the purpose of remaining abstract, but suddenly, this too become a limitation, because it precluded the use of recognizable shapes. Now, no shape or form is taboo; what I do is neither figurative nor abstract. A line will always look like a line and is thus figurative. But I always think in images. To think using words or language in a painting limits the work to the domain of verbal communication. If you go out at night to get a bowl of hot wonton noodles, you don't think of the word 'wonton', you visualize the bowl, the image of the rising steam; it's an entire environment. In my painting, ambience prevails".
His painting style consists of an uninterrupted dialogue with the canvas. "I'm always looking for balance in my paintings. Initially, the white canvas is perfectly balanced. The moment you put down the first stroke of paint, you destroy its stability. The game then begins with the second stroke. You destroy the painting and then you try to reconstruct another point of equilibrium with that second stroke and so on. Painting is like walking on a tight wire. The wire is still, but the moment you step on it, it starts to move. So, you have to feel the vibrations of the cord and learn how to keep your balance; each journey is always different".
"The most powerful line is the horizon, but the horizon doesn't actually exist. It's a line that you can see but will never be able to touch. In a painting, the horizon can exist in several places providing depth that doesn't actually exist; it's a sort of illusion. In fact, a painting never ends. There is no such thing as a finished image. For example, I wanted to do some touch ups on a painting from 1997. In the end, I nearly repainted it in its entirety. I think I could work on the same painting indefinitely for years and years".
Returning to Hong Kong in 1979, after his first solo exhibition in a cultural centre in Normandy, France, Wong Yan-kwai spent time with other artists returning from abroad, such as Antonio Mak. They brought with them a new artistic vocabulary that greatly impacted the Hong Kong art scene beginning in the early 1980s. Although his work is very personal and he refuses to be a part of any group, he is not detached from society. Indeed, many activities keep him engaged in the city's artistic life. Not only is he a screenplay writer but also one of the most sought after art directors and set decorators in Hong Kong cinema. He also works with a number of other artists in contemporary dance and theatre projects.
He is a passionate advocate for human rights in Hong Kong and in China and is also friends with some of region's most celebrated satirical and political cartoonists such as Zunzi and Ma Lung. Indeed, he is well known for his drawings, illustrations and occasional position papers couched as philosophical allegories that have appeared in the Hong Kong press for many years. Speaking of yet another creative aspect of his life, he is also an excellent blues guitarist and plays in several backroom bars every week with his friends just for fun, much like Woody Allen does. This is an old habit that he never gave up. During his Paris days in the 70s on Rue de l'Ouest in Montparnasse, near his studio (a former butcher shop), he and other neighbourhood musicians would get together to play and listen to music on Saturday nights. But painting is his true passion, "I can paint all the time. When I'm not working on a film, I go to the studio every day. The studio is like a temple for me and when things are flowing, it's like a real drug, I’m completely focussed and nothing else exists".
"I go out, I take it all in and then I squeeze all of it – myself included – onto the canvas", says Wong, "there's nothing more real for me than what I do". His painting is extremely luminous and joyful. It is delicate like some of the music composed by Erik Satie, a musician well liked by the painter. He uses a large palette of colours and exercises mastery over all of them, something which is quite rare. In 1991, he had big exhibition under the canopy at the Hong Kong University Museum. The light from the sky fell upon his paintings, which were arranged in a circle around the mezzanine, transforming the space into a veritable cathedral punctuated with stained glass windows. Matisse said that "colour helps express light, not the physical phenomenon but the only light that truly exists, the light within the artist's head". Wong Yan-kwai continues to paint like an unfinished painting, always starting over, because "it's like life; it pushes upward like a sprouting plant". And to a young artist who remarked that the work he was doing this year looked a lot like what he was doing last year, he replied mischievously, "Right, it's painting, not the Beaujolais Nouveau!"
Gérard Henry
English translator: Mark Green
*Gérard Henry is art critic, member of AICA (International Association of Art critics) editor of Paroles Cultural Magazine, and contributing writer for other publications or brodcasting programmes like Le Monde diplomatique, Perspectives chinoises, Radio suisse romande, France culture.
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