The Ever-changing Artist - The art of Chan Ping Kwong

Part I: Chan Ping Kwong, the Emerging Artist

Native to the city of Dongguan in the Guangdong province, China, a young Chan Ping Kwong studied Chinese classical literature and calligraphy under the guidance of his uncle. His father, Chan Kam Kwun was a well-educated merchant, managing a food business in Yuen Long, Hong Kong and later becoming the vice-president of the Yuen Long Chamber of Commerce as well as supervising director at several elementary schools. These contributions to his community earned him the respect of its members.

Chan Ping Kwong displayed exceptional talent and thorough diligence at an early age, studying art with a diverse mix of teachers and master painters. After graduating high school, Chan studied under Zhao Shao-ang, a master painter within the Lingnan School. By the 1960s, he studied with Orthodox master painter Deng Fen and Luo Shu Zhong, an expert in calligraphy and seal carvings. Later, he also studied with master painter Ding Yanyong, known for his fusion of Western and Chinese art. Chan mastered the different techniques, borrowing qualities from each to develop his own sense of style.

His friendships with fellow artists Situ Qi, He Boli, Liu Bing-Heng, Lok Hiu-Shan, Yau Bing-Leung, and Chan chow-yan greatly influenced his development as an artist. Their informal gatherings and discussions sharpened his artistic identity. These friendships led to the founding of an art club, resulting in many art exhibitions and travel to inspirational landscapes and landmarks around Mainland China and the Western world.

Part II: Chan Ping Kwong, the Established Artist

Chan Ping Kwong’s personality is as famous as his art; his keen sense of self, pride, confidence and fearlessness was well known. This personality is further revealed through his art. His strong technical foundation, meticulous fine detail, and his background in calligraphy allow him to interpret his subject matter in a new light. Chan’s composition is a lively play between space and sharp lines, bold brushwork and varying ink textures. He is an avid observer of nature; often drawing inspiration upon its spirit, a major element found in the foundation of modern Chinese painting. He realized that painters must return to nature - the source of the inspiration, to bring new life to Chinese painting.

Still, Chan’s innovation draws from his traditional heritage, testing its limits to express his own creative spirit and essence. His paintings display his progression from Realism to Abstractism. They demonstrate his attention to forms, his integration of surface, lines and dots and his contrast between principal colour schemes and colour tabs. As a result, Chan’s own creative sentiment is expressed and a new essence created.

Chan Ping Kwong excelled in five forms of calligraphy: Seal, Regular, Clerical, Running, and Cursive Scripts. He was most famous for his Running and Cursive script, showcasing his ability to fluently express himself in a powerful and dynamic way.

Over the course of his 50-year artistic career, Chan Ping Kwong was in pursuit of meaning in his artistic life. His goals were to conquer the Six Techniques of Chinese Painting by finding his own stylistic essence, to exceed limits imposed by tradition or self, and continuously modernize his thinking and interpretation. Chan Ping Kwong realized that there is no such thing as a means to an end, whereby there is only a means to a means.

CHAN PING KWONG AND HIS ART

Chan Ping Kwong was born into a scholarly family in Hong Kong. From a young age he received a traditional Chinese education. He was immersed in the study of the Chinese Classics as well as calligraphy and painting. Chan studied painting with some very prominent Chinese artists and he was holding exhibitions of his work at a very young age. In the 1960’s, he travelled widely to England, Italy, Germany, Belgium and Holland to study Western art. In the 1970’s he immigrated to Australia. Since then, he has been invited to lecture on Chinese painting in Korea and America. He has also held exhibitions in China, where he is widely acclaimed for his calligraphy and painting.

In Chan Ping Kwong’s works, calligraphy and painting are interchangeable. His painting are executed in the xieyi (lit. writing ideas) style with free calligraphic brushstrokes in an abbreviated, suggestive manner. Chan is painting in the scholar-amateur or literati tradition of painting which began in China in the eleventh century, when scholars took on painting as a means of relaxation and self-expression using subjects from nature (e.g. birds, rocks and flowers) as a vehicle for self-expression, his paintings are very expressive and spontaneous.

Chan’s calligraphy in the cursive style is equally expressive. The characters are powerful images that are full of strength and dynamic energy. The so-called feibai (flying-white) brushstrokes, executed with a semi-dry brush, create not only a sense of speed and movement but also rough, rugged texture. The characters are animated, evocative of the life force (qi) of nature. They are also pictorial as in an abstract painting. Like the visual images of nature in his paintings, the abstract images in his calligraphy serve as vehicles of self-expression.

As if echoing the a statement made by the scholar Zhang Yanyuan in the Tang dynasty (618-906) that ‘Calligraphy and painting differ in name but are essentially the same’, Chan’s calligraphy can be appreciated as abstract paintings, independent of the meanings of the words.

(Dr.) Mae Anna Pang
Senior Curator of Asian Art
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne