Wucius Wong

Wucius Wong was born in 1936 in Guangdong Province, China, and moved to Hong Kong at a very young age. Originally, he wanted to pursue a literary career, but gradually shifted his interest in pursuit of an artist’s career. Started as a self- taught artist and attracted to Western modernism, he later studied under the tutelage of Lui Shou-Kun in 1958, whose works entailed the exploration of traditional concepts via a modernist approach. He went to the United States to study Western art forms from 1961 to 1965. Upon his return, he worked as an Assistant Curator at the City Museum and Art Gallery from 1966 to 1974, and later joined the School of Design of the Hong Kong Polytechnic as Senior/ Principal Lecturer. Having participated in various important exhibitions worldwide, his works are collected by various museums and institutions around the world.

The abstract art of Wucius Wong has a “powerful, mysterious quality”, being at once vigorously captivating and elusively atmospheric. Often compared to the classical Chinese landscape painters of the Northern Song dynasty, the artist has mastered the ability to evoke the deeply spiritual and poetic within his sweeping ink works. The emotions rendered by his brush span a wide range; from the luminous evanescence of the interplay of light on water, to the brooding gravity of mountain ranges, and the dense complexity of patternistic clouds and roots.

Perhaps the most affecting element within the paintings of Wucius Wong is his startling clarity in capturing fleeting moments within nature, which have the ability to transcend the purely physical and translate into raw emotion. This unique perception is the defining factor which elevates his work from the realm of the visible landscape, to incisive psychological meditations on existential humanity.

He is now an Adjunct Professor of the Fine Arts Department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and serving as honorary adviser to the Leisure and Culture Department of the Hong Kong Government, he is also Committee Member of the Art School of the Hong Kong Art Centre and a Member of the Museum Advisory Group of the Consultative Committee on the Core Arts and Cultural Facilities of the West Kowloon Cultural District.

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