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.

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.

The founder of the Modernist School of Chinese Calligraphy, Gu Gan was one of the first to reinvent Chinese calligraphy for a contemporary audience. His works were typically multi-layered and given thematic titles that became an integral part of the composition.

Gu was known to experiment with classical calligraphy by blending multiple characters or separating them into radicals to reinforce their meanings. Later in his career, he increasingly integrated Western media, such as acrylic paints and colour pigments, into his works, combining painting and calligraphy to create an entirely new art form. 

In 1996, through an introduction by Michael Goedhuis, Gu was chosen by Baroness Philippine de Rothschild as the first Chinese artist to have his painting printed on the Mouton Rothschild wine label (the honour has been subsequently bestowed to Asian artists Zao Wou-ki, Lee Ufan and Xu Lei). Other household names who have designed a Mouton Rothschild label include Henry Moore, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon, Marc Chagall, David Hockney, Jeff Koons, Lucian Freud and King Charles III, who designed the label in 2004. 

In 2002, Gu Gan was included in the important exhibition Brushes with Surprise: The Art of Calligraphy in Modern China at The British Museum. 

Gu Gan’s works are in the collections of The British Museum in London, the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University, the Museum of East Asian Art in Cologne, the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien or Museum of Fine Arts, Vienna, the National Art Museum of China and the Chinese Olympic Museum in Beijing, and the Xunyao Chinese Characters Museum in Chengdu.

One of the most regarded artists in the Chinese diaspora, Gu is an alumni of the Shanghai School of Arts, a holder of a Masters of Fine Arts from the China Academy of Art and was trained by classical landscape master Lu Yanshao. By the mid-1980s, Gu was using his technical skills to subvert classical ink art, thus establishing himself as one of the leading figures of the Chinese New Wave art movement. He moved to New York in 1987 to help broaden his horizons. 

Since then, he has been investing in the nature of art and language. He is also known for installations and body art, and for using unusual materials like human hair, blood, semen or sanitary towels in his works. From 1993 to 2004, he installed 21 projects for the United Nations in various countries using human hair and his famed cryptic calligraphy.

Gu is credited with the use of unreadable characters to investigate the power of the written word. In many works, such as the one ECKART ASIA owns, he places these pseudo characters in surreal spaces.

Chinese ink artist Guan Zhi initially followed the traditional path of gifted students by attending the elite Renmin University in Beijing and later completing his Master of Business Administration at Jinan University in Guangzhou. However, exposure to calligraphy and ink painting in his childhood led him to becoming a professional artist. He later moved to the US under the EB1 visa, which is only granted to those with extraordinary skills. This was unprecedented since most foreign artists, especially those from emerging markets, usually enter the country first as tourists.

Guan slowly made a name for himself in the US and enjoyed a certain popularity in the West Coast, as evident in a solo exhibition at the University of California, Merced’s art gallery in 2016. He slowly developed his own signature, seeking to transform the classic aesthetic and qualities of Chinese ink painting into works that resonate with both Chinese and Western society. 

Guan’s dramatic and majestic works are greatly inspired by shanshui hua, the traditional Chinese art of painting natural landscapes using ink that was developed during the Song and Yuan dynasties. The technique declined in popularity during the Ming and Qing dynasties due to a of lack of ‘new basic technique and pictorial language.’

Today’s shanshui renaissance comes with a strong foundation of classical literature, but with an updated interpretation of pictorial art from scholar’s rocks to scenery. New techniques and styles are applied, such as texturing of mountains and rocks, contemporary painting treatments for water, clouds, trees, follies and other elements of nature. The large horizontal landscape painted by Guan, a part of ECKART ASIA’s The Juanita Collection, is a dramatic example that embodies these qualities and techniques. 

While Guan’s works have not been displayed in museums or biennales, they are held by private collectors and art dealers. He has been vetted for very prestigious art fairs such as TEFAF Maastricht, The Winter Show in New York City, Masterpiece and Asian Art in London, and various fairs in Miami and Los Angeles. 

Leung Kui Ting originally set out to be a carpenter but his plans were derailed when he learned painting from prominent ink artist Lui Shou Kwan and then studied design under celebrated artist Wucius Wong at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. 

Leung travelled extensively in the 1970s and 1980s but eventually returned to Hong Kong to concentrate on Chinese ink painting, eventually developing his own iconic technique using landscape art as a foundation. He spent many years experimenting with integrating Chinese and Western techniques to develop his own style.

Leung divides his career in two phases: the earlier ‘cause’ phase, which saw the artist experimenting for decades with Chinese ink and graphic design, and the ‘effect’ phase from 2000 onwards, which is a culmination of those trials. Roaming Vision, which is part of ECKART ASIA’s The Juanita Collection is from the second phase.

Hanart TZ Gallery founder Johnson Chang, who in 2014 mounted Geometry of the Spirit: 50 years of Leung Kui Ting, a major retrospective of the artist’s works, labels Leung’s artistic journey of experimentation and study as ‘contemporary becom(ing) infused with the traditional.’

Leung’s ingenuity lies in his use of a new methodology to give a modern interpretation to traditional Chinese art forms such as landscape and calligraphy. The use of ‘broken ink lines’, a Leung signature, gives the look and feel of texture to the artist’s paintings, as evidenced in the work ECKART ASIA owns. The strokes, while not obviously calligraphic, are still based on calligraphy.

M+ Hong Kong owns some of Leung’s work and included him in The Weight of Lightness, a special exhibition on Chinese ink in 2017. He is currently a lecturer at Hong Kong Polytechnic and the director of the Hong Kong Chingying Institute of Visual Arts, as well as a honorary advisor to the Leisure and Cultural Service Department.

Li Chevalier is an artist of many talents and educational achievements. A talented vocalist, she started singing at 15 years old for the People Liberation Army’s opera troupe until she was recruited to sing in the choir of the Orchestre de Paris. In the French capital, she went on to study at the Paris Institute of Political Studies and Sorbonne University, which led to later studies in major European capitals. Her last degree comes from Central Saint Martins in London where she took up art and was selected, in 2007, to participate in the Summer Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts. Both her musical background and strong philosophical foundation inspire her artwork.

Chevalier lives and works between China and France, and is part of a movement seeking to restore Chinese traditional art and appreciation, which was destroyed during  the Cultural Revolution. Her work has been featured at Art Basel Miami, TEFAF New York and Maastricht, Art Taipei and Fine Art Asia Hong Kong.

She has had exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome, a retrospective at the National Art Museum in Beijing (2010) and a solo exhibition at the Shanghai Art Museum (2011). From 2018 to 2019, she had a site installation at the Complesso Museale di Santa Maria della Scala in Siena. 

C.X. Li, aka Cai Xiaoli, graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing before taking on a teaching post at the school. In 1986, she was awarded a prize for the most outstanding painting at the Artists Exhibition and at The Sixth National Art Exhibition of China, both in Beijing.

Li is known for depicting traditional Chinese flora and foliage that symbolise luck and abundance, such as bamboo, orchids, narcissi and peonies, but interpreted in a Pan-Asian style using strong pigments with deeply saturated colour.  

In 1988, she joined her husband, painter Wang Jianan, in the United Kingdom. She has since exhibited jointly with him or in a collective in Munich, Hamburg, New York, Amsterdam, London, Cologne and Geneva. Li had her first solo show in 1990 in Oxford in the UK. In 2003, The National Arts Museum in Beijing mounted Beauty of Great Masters featuring 70 works by both Li and her husband. 

Born in China during a time of upheaval, Li Jin is one of the best-known and most loved unorthodox painters of the New Literati Group. The movement, composed of Chinese artists mostly born from the 1940s to1960s who experienced both the birth of New China and the Cultural Revolution, reflected the social and political changes that occurred during these historic times. An iconic feature of their work is the use of classical Chinese methods, such as ink painting, in combination with Western images –  as seen in Li’s famous comics – to create a fresh contemporary style that contrasts greatly with traditional and “revolutionary model” Chinese painting.

Li developed his own uniquely playful style in the early 1990s, and is now famous for images of food, wine and elements that depict the simple pleasures of the good life. The central debauched figure in all his work are meant to be self-portraits while the young women reflect his female ideal. The work ECKART ASIA has in its collection, which shows off Li’s distinct signature to perfection, is on the cover of the book Chinese Ink Paintings Now by Jason Kuo.

Li’s paintings are in the collections of the National Art Museum of China in Beijing, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Seattle, the Hong Kong Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the museums of the University of California in Berkeley and San Francisco, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Li currently teaches Chinese painting at Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts.

Before taking on formal studies in classical Chinese literature, poetry and landscape painting, Li Xubai was already creating art as a self-taught artist in Western painting. He soon developed his own style of painting landscapes as inspired by old masters like Gong Xian, although Li’s modern versions have no specific relationship to any geographical site. 

His paintings are flat, usually created with dry brushes to project different densities and a pixilated effect that’s similar to digitised media. Poetry are usually inscribed on his paintings. While written in traditional Chinese literary and classical art patterns, these verses describe Li’s experiences about having his own cultural identity in a foreign land. (He moved to Canada in 1996 and now lives in Toronto.)

Li’s work is found in the public collections of the Hong Kong Museum of Art, and the Chinese American Fine Arts Society and Asian American Broadcast Network in Boston. He was also included in the Hong Kong biennales of 1996 and 2003.