Going Forward

Plum Blossoms Gallery (New York) is pleased to present popular gallery artist Hong Zhu An in Going Forward, an exhibition of all new mid-size and large-scale paintings. Classically trained in calligraphy since his early youth, Hong Zhu An has been among a select group of painters pushing literati arts into a more cosmopolitan, contemporary realm. Best known for his work with abstract color fields that reference several thousand years of Chinese art through surface texture and tone, Hong Zhu An returns to the fundamental aesthetic of the line in his new paintings. Taking inspiration from the dramatic, drooping forms of willow branches and other tree imagery, he decomposes calligraphic elements into essential gestures that play fitfully between representation and text while still incorporating great swathes of ambient color and tonal depth suggesting elemental phenomena or the visualization of temporal reverberations.

Hong Zhu An’s paintings have developed out of the artist’s own intensely personal journey in search of creative resonance, roving nomad-like across the annals of Chinese material culture to the social realism of Communist China’s academies, street arts in Sydney, and his current residence in Singapore. Included in Going Forward are a number of paintings inspired by a recent trip he took to Bali, where the play of light through the dense, matrix-like branching of the island’s volcanic highland canopies evokes an alchemy of horizon: a lyrical tension between visual immediacy and extinguishment that complements the artist’s chosen media of richly textured mineral pigments on paper. Here, Hong Zhu An masterfully reinvents the painted surface as a terrain to be traversed, a living, breathing ecology both dangerous and enchanting that demands of its explorers a courageous, inquisitive first-step forward.

Hong Zhu An rose to prominence on the Singaporean art scene after winning the prestigious UOB Painting of the Year Grand Award in 1994. He was born in 1955 in Shanghai, China, into a family of painters. After training at the Shanghai Art & Craft Institute from 1973—1976, he became an assistant lecturer there until 1989, also taking a sabbatical from 1982—1983 to study under Professor Huan Wei Yi at the Sichuan Art Academy. Hong Zhu An left China for Australia in 1989, moving to Singapore in 1993 where he earned his MA from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia, at LaSalle-SIA College of Arts, Singapore, in 1997.