Hong Kong's Ink Pioneer: a Discussion of the Work of Lui Shou-kwan (1919-1975)
Lui Shou-kwan
It is impossible not to acknowledge the relative nature of terms when writing in one language, and from essentially one cultural perspective. When we talk about modernity, for example, we are often assuming that this connects with generally accepted timelines of artistic development in the West, and that this becomes the measure by which we can better understand the art of the East. Varying definitions of the term “modernism” itself also come into play, not to mention how these ideas might fluctuate between two different cultures, and the indeterminacy between two differing historical points of view.
Indeed, we might just as equally ask ourselves “Why did modernism and modern art come so late to China?” as “Did China have ‘modern art’ long before Europeans appeared on the scene?” (1) In reality, both these questions presuppose a definition of modernism that is dependent upon both Western timelines and means of interpretation, as well as an unhelpful and reductive dichotomy between East and West.
With this in mind, it’s still possible to perceive two Western-influenced waves of modernity in China, from 1929 to 1937, and from 1985 to 1989 – which saw the Tiananmen Square protests in June of that same year. However, it is also true that we can see important manifestations of artistic modernism – self-conscious and rebellious – not only in the Ming and Song but in the Tang dynasty, in the wildly splashed ink paintings of the late eighth century and its long-lived legacy; and, much earlier still, in Eastern Han art of the second century. (2) When it comes to art history, then, what is actually seen very much depends on who is doing the looking and where they are looking from.
This text will primarily explore Lui Shou-kwan’s work in relationship to its local context and its connection to the tradition of guohua in China. In this sense, I will assume Hong Kong to have a timeline of development that is independent to both China and the West. Whilst I will attempt to understand Lui Shou-kwan’s relationship to the history of guohua, this will be with a view to exploring popularisations of the term itself, as well ideas of progress or that which we might consider to be avant-garde.
Fig.1 Ink Play | Lui Shou-kwan (1964, 179.5 x 95.5cm, Chinese ink and colour on rice paper)
Origins
Lui Shou-kwan (1919-1975) was perhaps the most significant artist in Hong Kong during the second half of the 20th century. Recognized for his uniquely experimental approach, Lui is credited with expanding the tradition of Chinese painting by incorporating bold, gestural and abstract mark-making. (3) It was through this development of artistic language that he arrived at his most notable and unique form of Zen painting (Fig. 1) – an amalgamation of both allegorical and abstracted imagery. The resulting work traversed a fine line between representation and bold, pure mark-making, connecting traditional guohua practice with a more modern, international aesthetic.
Born in Guangzhou, Lui earned his bachelor’s degree in economics at Guangzhou University immediately after the Second World War. (4) In 1948, during a period of great political upheaval and social unrest, Lui Shou-kwan and his family moved to Hong Kong ahead of China’s ensuing Cultural Revolution. Here, while working for the Yaumatei Ferry Company, he initially took great inspiration from the surrounding landscape of mountains and sea views. Despite this, it is more often written that Lui’s work was born out of his exposure to and knowledge of modern Western painters such as Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell (5, Fig. 2).
Even in Hong Kong, he is regularly credited with fusing the two dominant streams of Chinese and Western art. (6) Certainly, he travelled widely to gain further understanding and influence for his paintings from the West. But to situate his work in a global canon, one in which it is understood predominantly in terms of its relationship to the modern art of the West, is to ignore the social-historical reality of its making and the view that “art, traditional, modern or contemporary, should be considered primarily within its own historical context.” (7)
Fig.2 Beside the Sea | Robert Motherwell (1967, 76.8 x 55.2 cm,
Acrylic and ink on paper)
Hong Kong during the 1960’s was increasingly influenced by the West, as a booming economy under the jurisdiction of the British when it officially became a colonial harbour in 1841. A modernist revision of The Prince’s Building had just re-opened, alongside the nearby iconic Mandarin Oriental. (8) The imprint of modernity, alongside an unprecedented population boom, was palpable. Manufacturing industries, too, started to reach their zenith, built upon the foundations of the previous decade’s development. This economic turning point meant that Hong Kong was now designated as one of the “Four Asian Tigers”, along with Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea. This process was not without its growing pains – in 1967 a labour dispute at a plastic flower factory led to a series of protests and lethal riots in the city. Communist sympathisers influenced by Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution on the Mainland, clashed with the city’s police in extreme violence that left more than fifty people dead. (9)
That same year, Lui Shou-kwan painted Fisherman after Wu Zhen (Fig. 3), now part of the collection of the Art Museum at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. The painting shows a melancholic, misty landscape further subdued by Lui’s inclusion of muddy, sombre hues. It appears to capture the low light at the end of the day, falling across the barren, rocky slopes of mountainous landscape. The mood here is tangible, a description of the first moments of light after the passing of a recent tropical storm. Josh Yiu has termed this narrative “a metaphor of longing for order to be restored in Hong Kong”. (10) And the inscription on the painting written by Lui himself cements this same idea: “All month long, riots have been raging but CUHK’s (Chinese University, Hong Kong) extramural ink painting classes have never been disrupted…Guo Gong thought it noble of Qu Yuan to rather feed himself to the fish than to go with the tide. I cannot bring myself to concur. Anyone with an aspiration should strive to stay alive and change the world in order to prove themselves.”
Fig. 3 Fisherman after Wu Zhen | Lui Shou-kwan (1967, 180 x 95 cm,
Ink and colour on paper)
Here, Lui’s idea of an art practice born out of not just a moment of civil unrest, but also as a means to ground and steady oneself in the face of adversity, feels unsettlingly familiar given Hong Kong’s more recent protests. (11) There is an equivalence here between the idea of “staying alive”, self-preservation and changing the world through innovation. Through art, Lui is arguing for a strong voice of identity that goes against the grain or the inevitable pull of the tide. It is a call for action rather than non-action, and he aligns the creative act and artistic field itself as maintaining a robust and “proven” sense of self.
The need for a proven sense of self was, for Lui, born out of a society in which the boundaries of cultural identity and subjecthood were ill-defined and under threat. Hong Kong at this time was relatively free as an environment that encouraged openness. (12) Yet clashes between Mao Zedong’s communist sympathisers, driven by the desire for reform, and British colonial powers continued to threaten the status-quo. Against this back drop of uncertainty, Lui developed his own style of ink painting and found himself able to alter, adapt and progress it in ways that would not be possible had his ideas been pressed into the service of the Communist agenda on the Mainland. (13) In so doing, he offered an alternative state of subjecthood, one that is not easily framed in national terms or in its relationship to the past.
Hong Kong art of this time was not simply being addressed to a local audience, but to an audience in the process of recognising its own autonomy. Lui’s art participated in the desire to affirm Hong Kong identity and even to some extent helped to give birth to it. (14) As he said himself, “The highest standard of art is truth, benevolence and beauty. The work of art is the emotive expression of humans on all things in the world, so that ‘the viewer cannot fully grasp its ingenuity,’ as the saying goes. As time goes on, there is no end to art which should not be defined in terms of ‘schools’. Those who can innovate are original and those who cannot are obsolete, even if the work looks modern.” (15)
Modern art in the West, if nothing else, has always been readily defined in terms of movements, schools and its ultimate end point, the transposition of life to a set of purely formal values, had already begun to be realised by artists such as Robert Motherwell – who had also been influenced by the gestural brushwork of traditional Chinese calligraphy and the Zen of Eastern Mahayana Buddhism. Developments in the West had not gone unnoticed in China, even as early as the 1920’s, where Chinese artists had already been appropriating hitherto unknown styles, techniques and ideas, often without fully understanding their original cultural context.
This situation led the influential writer Lu Xun (1881-1936) to muse, somewhat reductively: “A horrifying phenomenon in the world of literature and the arts in China now is the importation of an ‘ism,’ but without introducing the meaning of this ‘ism.’ As a result, everyone uses his own interpretation. When he reads a work mainly on the author himself, he calls that ‘Expressionism.’ If it concerns other people more, then it is ‘Realism.’ To be moved by a girl’s exposed legs to write poetry is ‘Romanticism,’ but to look at a girl’s legs and not be allowed to write poetry is called ‘Classicism.’ A head falls down from the sky, on this head stands a cow, oh, love. . . . Such is ‘Futurism,’ etc., etc.” (16)
In reality, artists such as Lui Shou-kwan traversed a much more nuanced boundary between ink painting’s connection to a new cultural identity, as it was being formed in the diaspora of Hong Kong and the heritage of China’s own past. Under Mao Zedong’s regime, artistic production and innovation had simply became a tool of the state. Hong Kong, through its own set of social reformations and the implementation of democratic rule was, on one hand, neatly positioned to grow in dialogue with the Communist regime on the Mainland, yet also not be entirely subsumed by it. On the other hand, it saw itself increasing exposed to Western influence with many of its artistic inhabitants traveling and exhibiting overseas. All of this against the backdrop of anxiety regarding the inexorable handover of Hong Kong in 1997, when the region would be returned once again to mainland Chinese rule.
Fig. 4 Flower in a Jar | Bada Shanren (1689, dimensions unknown, ink on paper)
Influences
As with many ink artists based in Hong Kong that later fled the Cultural Revolution, Lui Shou-kwan inherited his father’s interest in painting, studying works of past masters such as Bada Shanren (1626-1705, Ming Dynasty, Fig. 4), Shitao (1642-1707, Qing Dynasty) and Huang Binhong (1865-1955), whom he studied under for a short period. Preservation of cultural heritage, simultaneously bound up with both the desire and agency to reinvent it, underpins Lui’s position in Hong Kong during the second half of the 20th century. The advent of political crisis and civil unrest only served to hasten the dual aims of new ink artists in much the same way as it shaped conceptions of guohua on the mainland over fifty years previously. This shift in cultural production at the turn of the twentieth century on the Mainland, brought about a transformation in attitudes towards the concept of guohua, its relationship to society and the possibilities of what it could achieve.
From the early twentieth century to this day, painters in China have had to choose between guohua (Chinese-style painting) and xihua (Western-style painting), (17) caught between the attitudes of those who wanted to preserve their relationship to the past, and those who sought to disband it entirely in favour of Western values. For those in favour of maintaining a connection to the past, the term guohua was increasingly used to delineate and set their work apart from other practices. Indeed, guocuihua as a term was already synonymous with a style of painting that was deemed to be characteristic of China and served as a conservative intellectual effort that initially sought to differentiate Chinese people and culture from the non-Chinese. (18) However, in its most populist sense, guohua came to signify works executed predominantly in ink on xuan paper; the term guohua is thus often interchangeable with shuimo hua, meaning “water and ink painting” or more simply just “ink painting”. (19)
Julia Andrews has written that the term guohua is one of such imprecisions that it is problematic even for the historian of Chinese art. Shifting conceptions of what constitutes “national painting” mean that its usage has been adopted and redeployed to create distinctions in the artistic field that can either be born out of differences in materials, subject matter, or perceived continuity in Chinese technical or stylistic traditions. (20) Material characteristics such as paper and ink, however, were vital to the greater goals of associations and institutions whose fundamental remit was to promote and distribute art to a wider public. Indeed, it was through this institutionalisation of art practices that conceptions of guohua shifted emphasis from painting as private, personal pursuit as it had been for the literati, towards a mode of cultural production and dissemination now directed outwards into the public sphere. For many artists, this brought about a new tension between the interior, private world of the artist and the broader cultural identity of the artist as a national figure. In short, the borders of guohua, too, are ill-defined. Perhaps then the term is best understood through associations that are evoked which are more to do with the intangible or immaterial qualities of artistic production. The intrinsic quality or essence of a flower, for example, could simply be its scent.
Ultimately, Lui’s work rejected figuration out of hand in favour of a more lyrical and expressive language that bore close relationship to the materials themselves. However, he didn’t abandon those materials entirely and his works sought to challenge or reinvent the language of ink painting from within, still aligning his work with the concept of guohua in its purest form. He believed that artistic freedom was not a condition that could be bestowed, rather that it had to be worked at consistently and earnt through direct experience or practice. In looking to the art of past he encouraged younger artists to master both materials and technique, but as a means to developing their own voice, rather than adhering to tradition. Lui even likened this process of imitating ancient masterpieces to “deconstructing a wall and using the bricks to reassemble a new wall”, (21) arguing clearly here that the application of ancient methods should not be at the expense of personal expression. (22) Notably, too, he does not suggest employing a new function for the bricks or even for the wall itself, rather that the structure of it be repositioned more in line with the intentions and needs of the individual.
In Sailing Upstream (Fig. 5), completed in 1967, we can see Lui’s ambivalent approach to the art of the past laid bare. Notably, he has included colour again, a light blue wash to emphasise light and recession in much the same way that it had been used to describe indeterminate space as early the Song dynasty. But here we also see the inclusion of a brooding vermillion red describing the low light of the sun as it presumably sets towards the end of the day. Whilst this use of colour connects Sailing Upstream to Fisherman after Wu Zhen, also painted in 1967, it also starts to feel like an abstracted detail of the same rocky landscape, synonymous with the local geography of Hong Kong. Low light at sunset too, can perhaps be considered as an attempt to capture the intangible mood or essence of a landscape. It is very likely that this painting is modelled after a leaf in the album, Landscapes Depicting Poems of Huang Yanlu by Shitao (Fig 5), which was itself a document of the artist’s own versatility. But again, Lui has reworked the image so his own personal expression overrides the sentiment of the original piece, turning the idea of rote learning on its head and using it as a springboard for self-exploration.
Fig. 5 Sailing Upstream | Lui Shou-kwan (1967; 45 x 81 cm; ink and colour on paper)
Fig. 6 Landscapes Depicting Poems of Huang Yanlu | Shitao, or Zhu Ruoji (dated 1701-02; each image 20.5 x 34 cm; ink and colour on paper)
According to the inscription, the work constituted an in-class demonstration for those at CUHK whereby the students were invited to select a masterpiece to copy and discuss the merits and weaknesses of each. (23) Lui was known for his outspokenness both in class and in his writing, often attacking what he perceived to be “bad practices” in the Chinese painting circle, the penchant for conservatism, for example, and even the traditional teacher-disciple practice of having the student copy the master’s paintings. Whilst he didn’t disband the idea of learning through imitation entirely, he did insist that students also develop their own unique style and approach to painting. (24)
Lui Shou-kwan marks a succinct departure from previous models for the transmission of visual culture in China. His method valued such great departure from the original works of ancient painters, to the point that free expression took over completely. In the past, artists may have gained esteem in terms of how well they could might align their image-making with the work of their predecessors – or rather, how well they could gain mastery over material and technique – in order to press their works into the service of their historical peers. Lui Shou-kwan’s approach breaks fundamentally with this tradition, a tendency that can be seen clearly in works such as Luk Keng Village (Fig. 6) which bears no relationship to a specific classical painting and veers towards almost complete abstraction.
Luk Keng can be found on the northern most tip of Lantau Island, with views towards the New Territories, Pearl River Estuary and Guangzhou beyond – or in other words for Lui, home. Luk Keng today is flanked by Disneyland to the south and the ultra-modern airport development to the West, but in 1969 it would have represented a snapshot of idealized rural life in China, as yet untouched by outside influence. Lui’s depiction of it, however, abandons almost all stylistic conventions of traditional ink painting. There is little or no sense of spatial depth, other than that which is created by the mind’s eye, as it attempts to make sense of the abstracted imagery. Tonal values seem out of control and decided at once by the mixing of ink and water as it happens freely across the surface of the paper. There are no textured brushstrokes creating structure to the imagery, broad strokes are favoured here, applied in a seemingly haphazard manner. It’s an unmistakable impression of the sense that one gets upon reaching the top of a mountainous peak on Lantau Island and simultaneously being able to look up at clouds and adjacent peaks, down towards the village below and across estuary and beyond. As much as this piece abandons stylistic conventions then, it appears to function in a phenomenological sense very closely to paintings from the Chinese monumental landscape tradition (Fig. 8).
Fig. 7 Luk Keng Village | Lui Shou-kwan (1969; 139 x 69 cm;
ink on paper)
Outcomes
Lui Shou-kwan’s attempt to redefine the parameters of Chinese ink painting, was, on the one hand, a strategy of disaffirming notions of Chinese national identity in order to open up a new and alternative space for Hong Kongness. (25) On the other hand, it was an appropriation and reconstruction of a new formal language, with a resolution to collide the heritage of Chinese ink painting or guohua with the simplified abstract structures and gestural brushwork of Western modernism. It’s important to note that expressive brush marks commonly seen in calligraphy had been valorised in painting in China since at least the Song dynasty, (26) and that modern Western painters had long since been influenced by the calligraphy of the East. Perhaps most important and the greatest strength of Lui Shou-kwan’s work overall lay in the articulation of explicit cultural hybridity as a new national identity or “essence”.
This type of cultural hybridity was not readily found in Chinese art until much later in the 1990s. (27) However, for Lui and ink painting in Hong Kong (as well as Taiwan), it can be argued that this new form of hybrid painting was asynchronous to the development of visual culture in mainland China. David Clarke’s assertion that “avant-garde artists became reliant to a very great degree on opportunities for overseas exhibition and the predominantly non-Chinese audience of the international artworld”, bears some truth but ignores the reality of a global Chinese diaspora as an audience. It also fails to recognise the divergent timelines of development for these diasporic communities and the implications that these temporal ruptures have on an individual artist’s ability to take a truly avant-gardist position. What is truer, perhaps, is that “in Hong Kong … art was free to address Chinese public directly, and grow in dialogue with it”, suggesting that ultimately the meaning of art is manifest in the intersubjective space between artist and audience, as opposed to residing solely in the technique, material outcome or object itself.
Since Lui Shou-kwan’s death in 1975, his artwork had left an enduring legacy for subsequent generations of artists. He founded associations, wrote monographs and taught hundreds of students at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the University of Hong Kong. (28) Artists such as Wucius Wong (b. 1936), Irene Chou (1924-2011) and Laurence Tam Chi-sing (1933-2013) all actively held exhibitions to promote Lui’s vision of modern ink painting, carrying forward his ideas and values. At the time, these exhibitions not only broke the trend of imitation amongst Chinese painting circles, but also the dominance of Western paintings in the local art scene. (29) In this sense, he lay the foundations for an education system that promoted experimentation in the hope of cultivating a new generation of painters to revive the Chinese painting tradition and sprit alongside him. (30)
Perhaps more than any other artist, he is responsible for the surge of renewed interest in the practice of ink painting in the 1960’s, planting the seeds for the New Ink Movement that continue to influence contemporary artists in the city. Lui’s teaching especially left a mark on CUHK, an institution reported in the news more recently as one of the epicentres of civil unrest connected to the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement. This, the most recent example of attempts to assert a local identity separate to that of the mainland, saw the CUHK dubbed a “rioters’ University” by Chinese state media, giving sway to its reputation for being an epicentre of protest activity, noteworthy even among other campus hotbeds. (31) It is almost impossible not to recall here Lui Shou-kwan’s rallying call from 1967 that “anyone with an aspiration should strive to stay alive and change the world in order to prove themselves”, which feels hauntingly familiar even today.
Lui Shou-kwan: Hong Kong’s Ink Pioneer is currently on show at the Pavilion Gallery viewing room
Appendix 1 – Notes on Language
Lui Shoukwan’s appropriation of language in this new contextual arena also bears parallels to the use of the spoken word in Hong Kong, even to this day. It is perhaps here that we see in his work, and the work of others in the New Ink Movement, evidence of a separate local identity, one that exists in tandem to ideas of a Chinese national identity promoted on the mainland and explicitly expressed in its art. The development Hong Kong’s own language, in both painterly and linguistic terms alike, created a space for an identity that attempted to emphasise Hong Kongness in favour of Chinese. It is important too, that Cantonese, whilst not exclusive to Hong Kong, exists as the dominant language spoken by Hong Kong Chinese. It’s considerable contrast to Putonghua, the official national language of China, provides a day-to-day opportunity for the people to demonstrate cultural exceptionalism to the mainland. Although Cantonese in its written form, is inextricably linked to Putonghua, which straddles the two dialects. There has been a tendency in Hong Kong since the 1980s, particularly in the popular press, to abandon the pattern of standard written Chinese and use specialised characters not widely understood elsewhere in China, in order to give writing a flavour of Cantonese speech.
Footnotes
1 Silbergeld, Jerome - Modernization, Periodization, Canonization in Twentieth Century Chinese Painting, Seattle Art Museum, p15
2 Ibid p16
3 Whittaker, Alexander – Pavilion Gallery online publication, artist’s page – Lui Shou-kwan, accessed 10/4/21
4 Lai, Eliza – Lui Shou-kwan and the New Ink Movement in Hong Kong https://aaa.org.hk/en/ideas/ideas/shortlist-lui-shou-kwan-and-the- new-ink-painting-movement-in-hong-kong, accessed 10/4/21
5 Yiu, Josh Yiu, Josh – Preface to Two Masters, Two Generations and One Vision for Modern Chinese Painting. Paintings by Gao jianfu (1879-1951) and Lui Shou-Kwan (1919-1975) in The Chinese University of Hong Kong and The University of Oxford
6 Glauert, Rik – Indelible Influence, Tatler, Hong Kong, Art / Life, September 2015, http://www.alisan.com.hk/en/press.php, accessed 10/4/21
7 Silbergeld, Jerome - Modernization, Periodization, Canonization in Twentieth Century Chinese Painting, Seattle Art Museum, p15
8 Evans, Sam – Hong Kong in the 1960s, A Look Back in Time Through Photographs, Time Out, Sunday 26th April 2020
9 Ives, Mike and Chen, Elsie – In 1967, Hong Kong’s Protesters were Communist Sympathisers, The New York Times, September 16th, 2019 accessed 10/4/21
10 Yiu, Josh Lui Shou-kwan’s Study of Classical Paintings
11 South China Morning Post, Hong Kong Protests, https://www.scmp.com/topics/hong-kong-protests accessed 10/4/21
12 Lai, Eliza – Lui Shou-kwan and the New Ink Movement in Hong Kong https://aaa.org.hk/en/ideas/ideas/shortlist-lui-shou-kwan-and-the- new-ink-painting-movement-in-hong-kong accessed 10/4/21
13 Glauert, Rik – Indelible Influence, Tatler, Hong Kong, Art / Life, September 2015 , http://www.alisan.com.hk/en/press.php, accessed 10/4/21
14 Clarke, David – The Culture of a Border Within: Hong Kong Art and China, Art Journal, Summer 2000, Vol 59, No. 2 (Summer 2000)
15 Yiu, Josh Lui Shou-kwan’s Study of Classical Paintings - Yiu himself notes that ‘A hand-written copy of the article is preserved in the Art Museum of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Further research is needed to determine whether or when and where the article is first published.’
16 Chang, Arnold – Shadow Skeletons and New Realities, Guohua and Cultural Identity, Kaikodo and Luen Chai, The Flowering Field, Contemporary Chinese Painting, October 1997 pp 37 - 44
17 Hung, Wu – Transcending the East West Dichotomy: A Short History of Contemporary Chinese Ink painting p19 18 Ibid
19 Ibid
20 Andrews, Julia F – Traditional Painting in New China: Guohua and the Anti-Rightist Campaign p557
21 Yiu, Josh Lui Shou-kwan’s Study of Classical Paintings 22 Ibid
23 Ibid
24 Lai, Eliza – Lui Shou-kwan and the New Ink Movement in Hong Kong https://aaa.org.hk/en/ideas/ideas/shortlist-lui-shou-kwan-and-the- new-ink-painting-movement-in-hong-kong accessed 10/4/21
25 Clarke, David – The Culture of a Border within: Hong Kong Art and China p91
26 Whittaker, Alexander, Object Analysis of Early Spring, Guo Xi, 1072, pIV
27 Clarke, David – The Culture of a Border within: Hong Kong Art and China p91
28 Glauert, Rik – Indelible Influence, Tatler, Hong Kong, Art / Life, September 2015 , http://www.alisan.com.hk/en/press.php, accessed 10/4/21
29 Lai, Eliza – Lui Shou-kwan and the New Ink Movement in Hong Kong https://aaa.org.hk/en/ideas/ideas/shortlist-lui-shou-kwan-and-the- new-ink-painting-movement-in-hong-kong
30 Ibid
31 Barron, Laignee - TIME, November 13th, 2019 https://time.com/5726446/cuhk-chinese-university-hong-kong/, accessed 9/4/21
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Additional References (Chinese)
Lui, Shou-kwan – Fourth article on Wucius Wong's exhibition at City Hall, 1966, written by Lui Shou Kwan. The source of this clipping is unidentified, and this clipping is found in one of the three Kodak boxes dedicated to the Circle Art Group in Ha Bik Chuen's archive. Available via Asia Art Archive: https://aaa.org.hk/en/collections/search/archive/ha-bik-chuen-archive-circle-art-group/object/on-wucius-wongs- exhibition-4
Lui, Shou-kwan – Study on Chinese Painting, monograph, 1957. Available via Asia Art Archive: https://aaa.org.hk/en/collections/search/library/study-on-chinese-painting
Lui, Shou-kwan – A catalogue of the first joint exhibition by members of One Art Group, with preface written by Lui Shoukwan, 1971. Available via Asia Art Archive: https://aaa.org.hk/en/collections/search/library/one-art-group-239263
Lui, Shou-kwan – Third article written by Lui Shou Kwan, on his responses to Jackson Yu's exhibition which was held in 1966. The source of this clipping is unidentified, and the clipping is found in one of the three Kodak boxes dedicated to the Circle Art Group in Ha Bik Chuen's personal archive. Available via Asia Art Archive: https://aaa.org.hk/en/collections/search/archive/ha-bik-chuen-archive-circle-art-group/object/response-to- jackson-yus-exhibition-3
Lui, Shou-kwan – An advertorial for the retrospective show of Lui Shoukwan, the pioneer of the new ink painting movement in Hong Kong in the early 1970s. Published 12 December 2002. Available via Asia Art Archive: https://aaa.org.hk/en/collections/search/library/lui-shoukwan-the-pioneer-of-new-ink-painting-movement
Tam Chishing, Laurence – The Cradle of New Chinese Ink Painting Movement is an exhibition of 150 ink paintings created forty years ago by the secondary school students of Wah Yan College, Kowloon. The present catalogue includes four essays by Laurence Tam who taught ink painting at the College during that period. There is also a section on Tam's teaching methodology, citing painting exercises by the students as examples to demonstrate the various techniques in Chinese ink painting. Published by Wah Yan College, Kowloon, 2006. Available via Asia Art Archive: https://aaa.org.hk/tc/collections/search/library/the-cradle-of-new-chinese-ink-painting-movement-experiments- in-learning-and-teaching-of-new-chinese-ink-painting-of-wah-yan-college-kowloon-1966-1971-1966-1971
Image References
Fig.1 Lui, Shou-kwan – Ink Play, 1964
Chinese ink and colour on rice paper
179.5 x 95.5cm
http://www.alisan.com.hk/en/artists_detail.php?id=3
Fig.2 Motherwell, Robert – Beside the Sea, 1967
Acrylic and ink on paper
76.8 x 55.2 cm
https://www.jacobsongallery.com/exhibition-page-template-m24nx
Fig. 3 Lui, Shou-kwan – Fisherman after Wu Zhen, 1967
Ink and colour on paper
180 x 95 cms
Collection of Art Museum, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Gift of Mrs Alice Chin Wan Tam, Mrs Helen Chan Lo Ting and Dr. Anne Chin Par Lui, 2014.0021
Also published in Yiu, Josh – Lui Shou-Kwan’s Study of Classical Paintings, in Arts of Asia: The Foremost International Asian Arts and Antiques Magazine, vol.46, n°5, sept-oct 2016
Fig. 4 Bada Shanren – Flower in a Jar, 1689
Ink on paper
Dimensions unknown
https://www.wikiart.org/en/bada-shanren/flower-in-jar-1689
Fig. 5 Lui, Shou-kwan – Sailing Upstream, 1967
Ink and colour on paper
45 x 81 cm
Collection of Art Museum, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Gift of Mrs Alice Chin Wan Tam, Mrs Helen Chan Lo Ting and Dr. Anne Chin Par Lui, 2014.0021
Also published in Yiu, Josh – Lui Shou-Kwan’s Study of Classical Paintings, in Arts of Asia: The Foremost International Asian Arts and Antiques Magazine, vol.46, n°5, sept-oct 2016
Fig. 6 Shitao (Zhu Ruoji) – Landscapes Depicting Poems of Huang Yanlu, dated 1701-02
Ink and colour on paper
Each image: 20.5 x 34 cm
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/76548
Fig. 7 Lui, Shou-kwan – Luk Keng Village, 1969
Ink on paper
139 x 69 cm
Collection of The Chinese University of Hong Kong Foundation Inc. Gift of Denys and Victoria Firth