Hong Kong's Wucius Wong delivers riposte to 'derivative' Chinese contemporary artists
The 79-year-old rejects the view of contemporary Chinese art on display in current M+ Museum exhibition, and says his own show of ink paintings at PolyU is free of the cultural cliches international audiences have come to expect from Chinese artists
Wucius Wong has been part of Hong Kong’s artistic establishment for so long, it’s easy to assume that an upcoming retrospective of the Chinese ink painter is just another nice tribute to a long and prolific career.
Not so. Wong, who turns 80 later this year, says “Ink Innovations and Crossovers”, which opens at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University on March 15, is his way of balancing what he considers to be a misguided view of contemporary Chinese art that is currently presented in a major exhibition organised by M+. The exhibition he refers to is a look back at the past four decades of Chinese art through the sizeable collection that Uli Sigg has donated to M+.
“The M+ Sigg exhibition at ArtisTree suggests that some artists who have looked abroad and learned from the Western oil painting tradition are representative of the new China and how it faces the world. I don’t believe that,” says Wong in his Aberdeen studio.
Wong in front of his piece Great River No. 16. Photo: Bruce Yan
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“So Zhang Xiaogang has painted a few people sitting in a row and that’s a masterpiece? So Yue Minjun’s character with the big smile is a new classic? I don’t think so.”
