Rite of Red

Born in 1922 in Hong Kong, Hon Chi Fun started his artistic career with landscape paintings, which are the reminiscent of Western Impressionism, yet retaining the colors and techniques of Chinese traditional ink painting. During his initial phase of artistic career from the mid-1950s to the 1960s, Hon Chi Fun made tours to suburbs and the countryside of the city and did landscape sketches, fusing realistic approach with Western styles such as that of Impressionism. one of his early works, Floating Neighbour (Lot 664), well represents his attempt during this period to capture the landscape of the city and the suburbs with both the colors of Chinese traditional ink paintings and the mediums of Western art, oil paint and canvas. Around the mid-1960s, influenced by other artists of Modern Literature and art association, Hon Chi Fun started to develop his own fresh style of painting. One of the paintings created in this period, Untitled (Lot 663) in 1965, is a good example of his early experiments on bold sweeps of massive brushstrokes with gradation of achromatic colors, which are symbolic in Chinese ink paintings. The unique calligraphic style in lower part of the painting shows a deeply poetic sensibility. The mixed media part resembling relief sculpture, create textures not normally possible with ordinary watercolor or oil techniques. After his first trip to europe in the late 1960s, Hon Chi Fun paradoxically began to stick more to his own styles and became to be obsessed with geometric shapes and organic forms in his paintings to explore ideas about the mystique of nature. along his famous Circle series, Hon adopted rectangular compositions and the effects created by light and shade, emphasizing the harmony of form and color. In Untitled (Lot 665) created in 1984, the gradation in colors, from bright blue to indigo that almost looks like black, and the abstract forms of rectangles together create a certain aura that suggests a spiritual solitude and emptiness of the artist beyond his image. Hon's emphasis on the materiality of being and that of perception proceeds in his later works. In Rite of Red (Lot 666) created in 1993, great variations in concentration of a single color red accompanied by the bold brushstrokes suggest a wide spectrum in depth of the painting. Hon's journey with colors and forms allow the viewer to take his or her own interactive approach to his paintings.