Bath’s blessed with a variety of museums – covering all manner of subjects from locally made cars to classical architecture – but there’s one rather special one – just around the corner from The Circus – which can claim to be the only UK museum solely dedicated to the arts and cultures of East and South East Asia.
It’s currently hosting a small selection of paintings from a European touring exhibition featuring Chinese artist Hong Ling. Now in his 60’s this is a painter who mixes traditional Chinese ink paintings with the oils of our Western artistic culture.
The exhibition begins with early works from the late 1980s when Hong Ling completed his graduate training in western oil painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing (CAFA).
In the 1990s, his work was richly informed by his extensive travels across China, Asia, and many remote parts of the world. During this time, Hong Ling also started setting up his studio residence in the region of Mount Huangshan, a picturesque UNESCO World Heritage Site, in Anhui Province in eastern China.
Since then, he has focussed exclusively on landscape painting, encapsulating the traditions of Chinese aesthetic philosophies with western painting medium.
Working in parallel studios in Huangshan and Beijing, devoted to both oil and ink painting, Hong Ling’s works tell the story of one artist’s embrace of the natural world, his personal development, and his versatile creativity.
Bath Newseum went along to a preview evening to speak to curator Nicole Chiang.
Hong Ling – Selected is running at the Museum of East Asian Art through to July 2nd. Find out more via http://www.meaa.org.uk/
