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Like a Hong Kong David Hockney, Stephen Wong paints landscapes saturated in colour and emotions. His latest subject? The 100km MacLehose Trail
- Stephen Wong was taught using bright colours was vulgar, but the Hong Kong artist put that behind him, as his vivid landscapes of the city’s longest trail show
- Reminiscent of the work of Fauvists like Henri Matisse, the paintings, one for each of the New Territories trail’s sections, are being shown online by Bonhams
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On March 10, artist Stephen Wong Chun-hei will conduct a virtual tour of Hong Kong’s 100km MacLehose Trail. Or rather, an online walk-through of an exhibition at auction house Bonhams’ Hong Kong showroom of his latest paintings, which condense the city’s longest hiking trail onto 10 canvases.
There is one painting for each of the 10 official sections of the trail, which runs through the city’s New Territories and was established in 1979 under the then British colonial governor Murray MacLehose, himself a keen hiker.
Major landmarks on the undulating west-to-east trail from Sai Kung to Tuen Mun, such as High Island Reservoir and its East Dam and Hong Kong’s highest peak, are faithfully recorded by Wong – but these are not realistic landscapes.
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To “greedily” cram as much as he can into the paintings, Wong says he has been creative with his distortions of the actual geography and of time – a single image contains different lights and sea surfaces seen at different times of the day.
There is a bit of a rebel in me, I guess. As a student, I was discouraged from using bright colours because they were considered too ‘sweet’ and vulgar.
These are also landscapes of his own emotions as he spent six months fulfilling his dream of walking the length of the challenging trail, often with his outdoor painting paraphernalia in tow.
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