Hon Chi-Fun Chinese, 1922-2019
For an Equal Height, 1990
Acrylic on canvas
84 x 83.5 cm; (33 1/8 x 32 7/8 in.)
Copyright The Artist
Hon Chi Fun’s For an Equal Height (1990) exemplifies the late period of the singular Hong Kong modernist whose artistic evolution mirrored the shifting cultural tides of the twentieth century....
Hon Chi Fun’s For an Equal Height (1990) exemplifies the late period of the singular Hong Kong modernist whose artistic evolution mirrored the shifting cultural tides of the twentieth century. This acrylic painting, part of a series conceived during and after his extensive travels across Asia, Europe, and the Americas, marks a high point in Hon’s mature style – an expressive synthesis of East and West, form and flux.
The composition is dominated by fluid, gestural brushwork in rich reds and deep blues, punctuated by splatters of white and a fleeting presence of green. The liquidity of the paint, paired with the broad, sweeping strokes, evokes the restless movement of oceanic waters, abstracted, yet emotionally resonant. Despite its abstraction, the work is not without reference. It gestures towards landscape – not as a literal transcription of the visible world, but as an emotional and sensory field, shaped by memory, geography, and rhythm.
Born in 1922 in Hong Kong, Hon began his career painting naturalistic landscapes with clear echoes of Western Impressionism, while remaining rooted in the aesthetics of traditional Chinese ink painting. His early work from the 1950s and 60s reflects a hybrid sensibility – he would often sketch en plein air in the rural outskirts of Hong Kong, producing landscapes that fused the immediacy of Western oil techniques with the meditative brush economy of Chinese shanshui painting.
It was in the 1960s that Hon’s practice underwent a marked shift. Influenced by modernist literature and the existential introspection it fostered, he began to experiment more boldly with abstraction. The brushwork in For an Equal Height – broad, confident, and emotionally charged – is characteristic of this turn. There is also a clear residue of watercolour technique in the handling of pigment: the way colour bleeds, pools, and transitions from dark to light (notably from black to red) speaks to Hon’s early mastery of ink and water-based media. In this painting, colour becomes both material and metaphor – its progression from shadow to fire invoking not only formal dynamism but a deeper emotional pull.
By the 1980s and into the 1990s, Hon was also working with photography and collage, mediums which informed his approach to painting in terms of layering, fragmentation, and juxtaposition. While For an Equal Height is purely painted, it bears the conceptual imprint of this multimedia experimentation. It feels like a convergence point of image, memory, and gesture.
Throughout his life, Hon was committed to expanding the vocabulary of Hong Kong art. He stood apart from dominant artistic currents, pursuing instead a visual language that was as inwardly reflective as it was formally adventurous. For an Equal Height captures this complexity – at once a landscape of the mind and a record of motion, colour, and emotion distilled into a singular, arresting image.
The composition is dominated by fluid, gestural brushwork in rich reds and deep blues, punctuated by splatters of white and a fleeting presence of green. The liquidity of the paint, paired with the broad, sweeping strokes, evokes the restless movement of oceanic waters, abstracted, yet emotionally resonant. Despite its abstraction, the work is not without reference. It gestures towards landscape – not as a literal transcription of the visible world, but as an emotional and sensory field, shaped by memory, geography, and rhythm.
Born in 1922 in Hong Kong, Hon began his career painting naturalistic landscapes with clear echoes of Western Impressionism, while remaining rooted in the aesthetics of traditional Chinese ink painting. His early work from the 1950s and 60s reflects a hybrid sensibility – he would often sketch en plein air in the rural outskirts of Hong Kong, producing landscapes that fused the immediacy of Western oil techniques with the meditative brush economy of Chinese shanshui painting.
It was in the 1960s that Hon’s practice underwent a marked shift. Influenced by modernist literature and the existential introspection it fostered, he began to experiment more boldly with abstraction. The brushwork in For an Equal Height – broad, confident, and emotionally charged – is characteristic of this turn. There is also a clear residue of watercolour technique in the handling of pigment: the way colour bleeds, pools, and transitions from dark to light (notably from black to red) speaks to Hon’s early mastery of ink and water-based media. In this painting, colour becomes both material and metaphor – its progression from shadow to fire invoking not only formal dynamism but a deeper emotional pull.
By the 1980s and into the 1990s, Hon was also working with photography and collage, mediums which informed his approach to painting in terms of layering, fragmentation, and juxtaposition. While For an Equal Height is purely painted, it bears the conceptual imprint of this multimedia experimentation. It feels like a convergence point of image, memory, and gesture.
Throughout his life, Hon was committed to expanding the vocabulary of Hong Kong art. He stood apart from dominant artistic currents, pursuing instead a visual language that was as inwardly reflective as it was formally adventurous. For an Equal Height captures this complexity – at once a landscape of the mind and a record of motion, colour, and emotion distilled into a singular, arresting image.