HONG KONG.- Collect Art is presenting a group exhibition by Hong Kong contemporary ink artist Hung Fai and the first TECH-iNK artist Victor Wong at Duddell’s Hong Kong. On view from 26 June to 25 July 2019, Diverse Landscapes features Wong’s works from the Escapism and Far Side of the Moon series, in dialogue with Hung’s works from The Six Principles of Chinese Painting - Transmission and Splash series.

From film to ink art, Victor Wong is the creator of A.I. Gemini, the world’s first robotic ink artist programmed with artificial intelligence to paint unique Chinese landscapes. The works from the Far Side of the Moon series are inspired by the ground-breaking contact with the unexplored side of the Moon in early 2019, when China’s Chang’e-4 probe landed on the distant hemisphere. Fed with the Chang’e-4 images and 3D observation data from NASA, Gemini has analysed and interpreted these in its own style to create unique lunar landscapes. Also, the exhibition will showcase Wong and A.I. Gemini’s first leap in art - Escapism series experiments with Chinese brush and ink painting; establishing a space for traditional Eastern aesthetics in the modern world.

The Millennial Hong Kong artist Hung Fai who focuses on contemporary ink grew up in an artistic family. In works from The Six Principles of Chinese Painting - Transmission series, Hung Fai challenges the practice of ‘Transmission’ (exercises of copying and imitating) from Xie He’s ‘Six principles of Chinese Painting’ written in the sixth century. Hung invited his father Hung Hoi, a renowned landscape painter, to paint a landscape with brush and cinnabar on paper, as a model representing the classical authority. With the paper folded and saturated, he then traced the revealed cinnabar contours with a black fountain pen. As ink seeped through the paper, the steady red lines and bouncing black dots unevenly duplicated and overlapped, embodying the shifting power relations between father and son, tutor and pupil.

Heiman Ng, Curator of Diverse Landscapes and Director of Collect Art says: “Two artists from different generation and background, with the same passion for ink, especially in landscape painting, are using their own ways to inherit, subvert and innovate. This summer, the special show at Duddell’s in Hong Kong, attempts to line up two ink artists with completely different techniques and concepts, putting their landscape paintings together, from which audiences can experience what is Diverse Landscapes in ink, fountain pen and even the A.I.’s brush stroke of diverse works.”

Victor Wong is an artist and director, best known for his digital work and special effects, and has been widely acclaimed by international collectors and media. Wong graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle in 1989. He has pioneered emerging digital creative media in the film industry. Wong has developed visual effects for over 100 feature films with his special effects company vfxNova. This work has won numerous international design awards including The New York Festival Award, Tokyo JIAA Advertising Award, Hong Kong Film Awards and The Golden Horse Awards. He is currently focusing on a new form of Chinese ink painting through state‐of‐the‐art technology. His creation, A.I. Gemini is world’s first artificial intelligence ink artist and took three years to build and programme. It takes its name from the astrological sign represented by twins, a reference to the twin aspects of it’s A.I. mind and robotic body.

Born in Hong Kong in 1988, Hung Fai has developed a deep interest in painting since childhood. He received a bachelor in Fine Arts from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2013. Exploring with both Chinese and Western media, Hung has developed unique expression and presentation techniques on both paper and canvas. Through deconstruction of elements in traditional Chinese ink paintings, his works are reconstructed conceptually with series of experimentation and transformation, and extended possibilities in ink painting.With his bold experiments in ink, Hung was fairly awarded in academy and won the Hong Kong Art Prize 2013(Merit) and The 12th National Exhibition of Fine Arts of China 2014(Excellent Work). His works are often featured at world-renowned fairs like Fine Art Asia and Art Basel Hong Kong and are collected by M+ Museum for Visual Culture, Hong Kong, Hong Kong Museum of Art and private collectors.