Yau Wing Fung Chinese, b. 1990

Yau Wing Fung (b. 1990, Hong Kong) received his master’s and bachelor’s degrees in fine arts with first-class honors from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at CUHK. Yau’s works span across a range of genres and mediums, including traditional and contemporary ink, calligraphy, and installation. His recent paintings combine traditional aesthetics with a contemporary influence by mobilizing the vocabulary of classical landscape painting through the aerial perspective of remote-sensing images. Yau’s installations expand the spatial relationship between viewer and representation of landscape by reframing traditional landscape paintings.

Those installations reinterpret the idea of “sceneries shifting with the movement of every step,” a saying that describes the viewing experience of traditional Chinese landscape painting. Yau centralizes the concepts of “guan” (观) and “yuan” (远) in his artistic practice. “Guan” refers to viewers’ imagination of a space that expands outside the limited picture frame. “Yuan” inspires people to look beyond the visible and finite toward the boundless and infinite. “‘Guan’ represents my internal perceptions and reactions when I encounter an object; ‘yuan’ represents my spiritual direction when I depict the object,” Yau wrote. His works offer new expressions of “guan” and “yuan” by reconfiguring perspective, pictorial depth, the balance between emptiness and solidness, and surface texture.

Yau has held numerous solo exhibitions in New York, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau. His works have been featured in international exhibitions such as Wu Bin: Ten Views of a Lingbi Stone at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Art Basel, Ink Asia, and "Floating Island Generation" at the NTNU Art Museum in Taiwan. Last year, his works were selected by FQM to participate in the United Nations Chinese Language Day Exhibition The Highest Virtue Resembles Water. Yau’s works are in prestigious public and private collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, M+, Hong Kong Museum of Art, Ink Society, Landmark Hong Kong, and Cathay Pacific Airline. Yau was honored with the silver prize of the "Liu Kuo-Sung Ink Art Award." This year, Yau was commissioned by United Overseas Bank (UOB) and Art Central to create a large-scale ink art installation.