Tongson Wesley 唐家偉 (b. 1957)

Wesley Tongson was diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of 15. The mental condition, together with a devotion to Zen, shaped both his art and life. At 17, he began to formally paint in the Chinese literati style of wenren hua, a tradition that was the domain of intellectual Chinese scholars particularly during the 15th- and 16th-century Ming dynasty.

Tongson spent his early 20s in Canada, where he studied Western art at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto. On the side, he studied classical ink painting and was exposed to the splash ink techniques of 20th-century master Zhang Daqia whose modernist approach influenced an international audience, including Pablo Picasso. But Tongson’s skill and knowledge of shanshui hua, the traditional Chinese art of painting natural landscapes, still served as a foundation for his versatile output. Throughout his career, Tongson would consider landscape painting to be the most difficult and highest accomplishment of Chinese art.

Tongson returned to Hong Kong in 1981 and came under the tutelage of modern Chinese ink painter Liu Kuo-Sung. Influenced by his teacher, he began to develop his own style of Chinese landscape art. In the 1990s, Tongson explored ways of integrating his splash ink methods with traditional Chinese brushstroke techniques before experimenting with finger painting in the early 2000s. By 2009, Tongson had abandoned the brush altogether, and painted directly with his fingers and fingernails, creating emotionally communicative and powerful pieces that became a hallmark of his ‘mature’ period.

In his short life, Tongson did not just use ink to cover a wide range of subjects in unusual styles; he also experimented with the use of fluorescent colour, which, to this day, sets him apart from most contemporary artists.

The two works ECKART ASIA owns are from the prolific artist’s The Mountains of Heaven series, which he worked on from the late 1980s to 2004. These works are the last two to interpret Chinese landscapes using ‘Tongson colours’, with their combinations of phosphorescent pinks, greens, blues and dark oranges hovering over mountains. (The entire series evokes the influence of Zhang’s splash ink style using vivid pigments of bright pink, jade green, azurite blue and burnt sienna that blur against black and white mountain ranges).

Despite his mastery of ink painting and strong classical fundamentals, Tongson remained unrecognised in the world of contemporary Chinese ink. However, there has been a growing international interest in the artist since his death in 2012. Tongson’s work has been shown in numerous solo exhibitions, most notably a retrospective at the Hong Kong Arts Centre in November 2014, at the Chinese Cultural Center in San Francisco from October 2018 to March 2019, and at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in 2022. His very first show at Galerie du Monde (one of EKCART ASIA’s dealers) in 1986 was highlighted at the Art Basel Kabinett in 2023.

Tongson’s work is part of the collections of the Hong Kong Museum of Art, the University of Hong Kong’s University Museum and Art Gallery, M+ museum and of Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong, the USC Pacific Asia Museum, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, and Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in San Francisco, as well as numerous public and private collections worldwide.