Born in Bordeaux to a family of artists and architects, Guillaume Alaux was a pastellist who was recognised for his portraits, genre scenes, still-life paintings and seascapes. Though he studied in Paris at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts under prominent artists such as Léon Bonnat, Fernand Humbert and Henri Gervex, Alaux retained ties with Bordeaux’s late 19th-century art scene, working alongside the ‘painters of Bordelais elegance’, which included Jules Aviat, Paul Quinsac and Paul Antin. 

In Paris, Alaux often exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français and was a member of the jury of the Société nationale des Beaux-Arts. His studio in the French capital welcomed many an important figure of La Belle Époque, considered to be Paris’ Golden Age.

While he often worked with pastels, Alaux was also adept in oils – one of his paintings depicting life by the sea won the bronze medal at the Exposition Universelle of 1900. 

Apart from France, Guillaume Alaux also exhibited his works in Rome, Brussels and the United States. 

Albert Simon Bussy studied under Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where Henri Matisse was among his friends. He mastered the use of pastels early on in his career and would exhibit his work at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1897 and 1899. Bussy’s pastels were widely admired by his contemporaries and avidly collected. Of the artist’s creations, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire wrote, ‘The pastels of Simon Bussy are delicate images as precious as Persian miniatures. Precision and vitality are the characteristics of Simon Bussy’s talent, and his use of colour often reaches the heights of Matisse.’

Around 1901, Bussy visited London, where he was introduced into local artistic circles by the artist William Rothenstein, who later praised the former’s exhibition at Leighton House in a letter: ‘It was a real delight to see your work again, and I got more pleasure and emotion from your beautiful pastels than I have had from any pictures of late.’

In 1903, Bussy married Dorothy Strachey and moved to a house near Monaco, where they lived for the next three decades. The house, called Le Souco, became a meeting place for English and French artists, and writers and intellectuals visiting the area, including Dorothy’s brother Lytton Strachey and her cousin Duncan Grant, as well as Matisse, Rudyard Kipling, André Gide, Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf and Bernard Berenson, who came to own several of Bussy’s pastels, as did Jean Schlumberger.

Early in his career, Bussy produced portraits of friends and family, as well as splendid pastel depictions of landscapes in Switzerland, Venice, Tunisia, Egypt and the Meditterranean. By the time he reached his 40s, he had turned to drawing likenesses of birds and animals. Often, his subjects were creatures at the London and Vincennes zoos. He preferred drawing the fish at Vincennes, reasoning that the aquariums at the London Zoo had inadequate lighting. As the French writer André Gide noted, Bussy, after spending time at the zoo, would ‘shut himself up with his collection of studies and, by a kind of patient and lover-like distillation, evolve from them his paintings.’

Throughout his career, his pastels and paintings were exhibited at galleries in London and Paris. Among the most significant of these was an exhibition of 40 paintings and 62 pastels of animals and birds at the Galerie Druet in Paris in 1925. Some of these pastel studies were later used for larger works in oil on canvas, several of which were illustrated in a stunning book entitled Bestiaire, published in Paris in 1927 with text by Francis de Miomandre. By the Second World War, Bussy’s reputation had fallen into a decline in France although he continued to exhibit at the Leicester Galleries in London. He died in London in 1954 at the age of 88 and the contents of his studio went into auction at Sotheby’s in 1960.

Paintings and pastels by Simon Bussy are today in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery and the Tate in London, the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University, the Musée nationale d’Art Moderne in Paris and the Musée départemental de l’Oise in Beauvais.

Taiwan-born Lee Chun-Yi, who moved to Hong Kong as a child in 1970, graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong where he was mentored by Chinese ink master Liu Kuo-Sung. He later returned to his birth country and earned a Masters in Fine Arts from Tunghai University. 

Chun-Yi’’s distinct and revolutionary style is credited to his non-traditional way of employing calligraphy — the artist creates his own chops by carving Chinese characters or symbols onto wood. With these hand-carved tools, Chun-Yi creates visual compositions, from landscapes to portraits, with dramatic photography-like end results. In 2016, one of his Mao triptychs sold for over USD72,000 at Christie’s Hong Kong. 

Chun-Yi’s work is in the permanent collections of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University, the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard University, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Phoenix Art Museum, the Hong Kong Museum of Art, the Jiangsu and Qingdao Art Museums in China and more around the world.

Born in London, Clausen trained at the National Art Training School (now the Royal Academy of Art) in South Kensington before going abroad for further studies at Art Antwerp Academy, and Académie Julian in Paris. Initially influenced by Dutch painting, he later embraced French naturalism and Impressionism, taking inspiration from the works of Jules Bastien-Lepage, Monet and Degas.

In the 1880s and early 1890s, Clausen frequently worked in pastel, often on rough brown paper, exhibiting several pieces in this medium. Between 1888 and 1890, he showcased pastel works at the Grosvenor Gallery and was a founding member of the New English Art Club, where he exhibited from 1890 to 1893. By 1891, he was showing at the Royal Academy, though his first solo exhibition only came in 1902. He was elected a Royal Academician a few years later in 1908.

Clausen was praised for his pastel technique more than his other artistic endeavours. One reviewer from his 1902 Goupil Gallery exhibition remarked, ‘the stroke of the pastel chalk seems to be the most direct and satisfactory means of expression for Mr. Clausen. In his oil paintings he often appears to hanker after it, hatching his paint without the same result in freshness…Here the notes are clear struck and decisive. He renders more than once a beautiful effect that is almost his own property.’

In 1926, Clausen was among eight British artists commissioned for a large mural in St. Stephen’s Hall at House of Commons and was knighted upon its unveiling the following year. Today, his pastel studies are held in the collections of the British Museum and the Royal Academy of Arts.

Fung Ming Chip is a poet, calligrapher, playwright, photographer, sculptor and seal carver who was born in Guangdong but raised in Hong Kong. He moved to New York City in his 20s, and would later divide his time between the city, Taiwan and Hong Kong. He moved back to Hong Kong permanently in 2006.

While most contemporary calligraphers take inspiration from classical Chinese literature or painting, Fung’s brand of calligraphy connotes aspects of time and space, and would be closer to scripted music or text as a choreography of the brush. The Juanita Collection owns a vertical scroll with these qualities.

In 2004, Fung had an artist’s residency at Cambridge’s Jesus College. His work is displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Harvard and Princeton University museums, the Asian Art Institute in Chicago, the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University and the Hong Kong Museum of Art.