Art Totems Bridging East & West: Eddie Lui's Four Decades of Artistic Pursuit With Eddie Lu

The Museum Society is delighted to invite artist Eddie Lui to guide us through this exhibition of his work of artworks documenting his long and distinguished career.

In the early 1970s, Lui completed an art and design course with the Department of Extra-Mural Studies at The University of Hong Kong (now HKU SPACE), before he studied a one-year contemporary ink painting programme with Hong Kong ink painters Lui Shou-kwan (1919–1975), Wucius Wong (b. 1936), and others. Since then, Lui has developed his own individual style, displayed his deeply felt admiration for nature, and created a new language of naturalistic as well as abstract motifs. As a draftsman, painter and sculptor—Lui is one of the founders of contemporary art in Hong Kong.

Inspired by the naturalism of America-born painter Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) as well as steeped in the tradition of Chinese bird-and-flower painters, Lui depicts exotic fruit and vegetables full of life and symbolism. His artworks, whether in ink, gouache, Japanese handmade paper on canvas, or sculpted in clay, are reminiscent of poetry that connects us humans with nature and appeals to our senses.

Over the years, Lui’s palette changed and the often bright and flamboyant colours gave way to more muted monochrome ink. At the same time, in artworks large and small, the fine execution of each detail and the certainty with which the artist’s brush moves remain of the highest quality. A generation younger than his master Lui Shou-kwan and other influential ink painters, such as Hon Chi Fun (b. 1922) and Liu Kuosung (b. 1932), Lui himself became a gifted teacher who instructed students and helped develop New Ink Painting as a discipline.