Land scape
CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
LandEscape meets
Tsz Mei Wong
An interview by Katherine Williams, curator and Josh Ryder, curator landescape @ europe. com
Artist Wong Tszmei ' s work expresses the tradition value emphasizing space and volume in the configuration and adapting the linear structure of traditional expression. Her works unveil the elusive Ariadne ' s thread that link Tradition and Contemporariness, challenging the viewers ' cultural substratum to induce them to elaborate personal associations, offering them a multilayered aesthetic experience. Her paintings oscillate between control and chaos to capture a new perspective on the world. One of the most impressive aspects of Tszmei ' s work is the way it accomplishes a successful attempt to synthesize tradition with visual experience and Western art. We are very pleased to introduce our readers to her stimulating artistic production.
Hello Wong and welcome to LandEscape: before starting to elaborate about your artistic production would you like to tell us something about your background? You have a solid background and you completed Master of Arts on the art history of antiquitiesat Tsinghua University of China. How do these experience influence your evolution as an artist? And in particular, how does your cultural substratum dued to your inform the way you relate yourself to art making and to the aesthetic problem in general?
I was born in 1960 in H. K., I seemed to possess the talent for painting since childhood. My playmates adored my sketches and the adults also praised my drawings. I could not afford to pay the tuition, so until I was enrolled in a college of education, that I could take the course of western painting and Chinese painting with the grant and loan offering by government. I also earned my living expenses by teaching children to paint. From that time onward, I have been teaching people to paint until now. I really benefited from teaching people painting, both Western and Chinese painting, from children to adult, for various ways to make others to accomplish one’ s work of art to be conceived, therefore researches had to refer to all essential aspects of a subject matter, then comprehension deepened.
The acquaintance with Chinese and Western art fulfills my attempts to synthesize the East and West. However, the straddling of cultures is not a simple task, for there must be some give and take to establish a lively imagery, otherwise an work of art would be reduced to the agglomeration of elements of both culture with empty concepts; or it is just the formalistic play with trite visual images just to convey some superficial notions of a culture. But I have in my blood an uneasy need for change, which is the constant evolution of perpetual search for progress in my métier. I am impelled by a desire of escaping the confines of tradition and the finality of a kind of visual form. Years of obstinate plodding along the same path of painting dotted with difficulties and successes, with anxious self-questioning and uncertainty, I am still able to carry my purpose. Moreover, I love oil paintings. The impressionistic oil