Are scenes drawn from Google Earth landscape painting? Hong Kong artist asks the question in his latest exhibition
- The works in Stephen Wong’s ‘A Grand Tour in Google Earth’ are depictions of places the artist travelled to virtually instead of actually being there
- In doing so, he says he took a mini break from what he loves most – painting from real life and experience, including the sounds and smells of a place
Stephen Wong Chun-hei’s exhibition “A Grand Tour in Google Earth” was prompted by an intriguing proposition: if an artist travels only virtually and paints what he sees on a screen, does it still count as landscape painting?
The Hong Kong artist’s latest solo exhibition at Gallery Exit in Aberdeen is the product both of a lengthy travel moratorium and the ubiquitous convergence of the digital and the real. The 35-year-old, best-known for his large-scale Hong Kong landscapes in brilliant hues, sees his recent works as a return to an idea he first explored as a fresh graduate – albeit reluctantly.
Young artists are always told to develop a sound conceptual underpinning to their practice, he says, and even though his inclination was to paint from real life, he started out by painting scenes from video games – because he thought it would qualify as “conceptual art”.
“It’s ironic really. I stopped doing video games painting after a few years because I didn’t want to paint from a screen any more,” he says.
The artist has come a long way from those early, self-doubting years, having enjoyed both institutional and commercial success. His 2018 monumental diptych Pat Sin Leng (from the Spring Breeze Pavilion to the Lion Pavilion) was collected by the Hong Kong Museum of Art in 2019, and his acrylic paintings of Hong Kong have been selling well, with the city as subject matter having become more popular with art collectors in recent years.
