Joint UMAG Programme: Tradition to Contemporary: Ink Painting and Artistic Development in 20th-century China and The Companionship of Art II (ii) —Exhibition of Artworks by Ding Yanyong with Dr Fongfong Chen and Dr. Tang Wai Hung

On this Guided Tour, the HKU Museum Society will be taking you to not one but two exhibitions. The first is the current exhibition on ink painting “Tradition to Contemporary: Ink Painting and Artistic Development in 20th-century China” at the University Museum and Art Gallery (UMAG) with Dr. Fongfong Chen, and the second takes you to the Jao Tsung-I Petite Ecole to see “The Companionship of Art II (ii)—Exhibition of Artworks by Ding Yanyong” with Dr. Tang Wai Hung.  To register on-line, please visit: https://goo.gl/5knCLq

“Tradition to Contemporary: Ink Painting and Artistic Development in 20th-century China” is curated from artworks within the museum’s permanent collection, and trace the evolution of ink painting in Hong Kong, including many well-known masters that have helped to build the city’s art scene and museum collections. The exhibition offers audiences a broad overview of the provenance and aesthetic quality of individual works, and the cultural interactions among twentieth-century Chinese artists, curators, collectors and scholars in Hong Kong, mainland China and abroad.                             

“The Companionship of Art II” at the Jao Tsung-I Petite Ecole of The University of Hong Kong, displays artworks by four artists who had a profound friendship with Professor Jao Tsung-i between the 60s and 80s of the 20th century, including Liu Bing-heng (1915-2003), Ding Yanyong (1902-1978), Zhao Shao-ang (1905-1998), and Wu Hao (1930-2017). In this exhibition, most of the artworks are from the collection of Yun Quan Studio, and the collaborative painting with Professor Jao belongs to the Jao Tsung-I Petite Ecole of The University of Hong Kong, with most of the works dating from the 60s to the late 70s, containing his landscape, figure, bird-and-flower paintings, and cursive script calligraphy. Through these art pieces, art lovers are able to acquire a general idea about Ding’s unique style.

Resource Persons

Dr. Fongfong Chen is an Associate Curator at the University Museum & Art Gallery (UMAG) and an Honorary Assistant Professor at the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). She was a J.S. Lee Memorial Fellow (2013/2014) and a visiting scholar at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), Berkeley, USA. Her research focuses on images of women and women’s fashions in different visual media in China from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Her articles have appeared in academic journals and exhibition catalogues, including Ming Qing Yanjiu, Beauty Revealed: Images of Women in Qing Dynasty Chinese Painting, Der Perfekte Pinsel: Chinesische Malerei 1300-1900 (The Perfect Brush: Chinese Painting 1300-1900), and Hong Kong Visual Arts Yearbook 2008.

Dr. Tang Wai Hung is Deputy Director of the Jao Tsung-I Petite Ecole, The University of Hong Kong, and is an experienced art collector and connoisseur. He was a senior executive in several television corporations in Hong Kong and Macau, and managed the production of numerous programmes, including a series on the National Palace Museum in Taipei and Palace Museum in Beijing. He has lectured in a number of tertiary institutions. He is the author and editor of hundreds of publications on various subjects including Chinese painting.