Hung Fai is a Hong Kong-based artist whose practice investigates the possibilities of ink painting through both classical Chinese and Western elements, incorporating and revisiting traditional techniques to create works that are lyrical and powerful. As a third-generation artist, he approaches traditional ink painting through a conceptual lens, deconstructing the medium and its principles to question important themes of our times.

The Six Principles of Chinese Painting – Transmission is a body of work that Hung made in collaboration with his father, the renowned landscape artist Hung Hoi. The series interrogates ‘transmission’, one of the cornerstones of traditional Chinese painting as laid out by the 6th-century artist and writer Xie He. Transmission, according to Xie, relates the process of learning and copying from masters. In these works, Hung revisits this concept and investigates its significance within intergenerational relationships, the concept of authorship, and the balance of authority between parents and children. The artist unpacks these ideas through his works, creating layered, ghostly evocations of the landscape in a multi-stage process.

The Six Principles of Chinese Painting – Transmission XXVI (with Hung Hoi) comprises a depiction of a landscape that is repeated and reflected across the sheet. To make this work, Hung invited his father Hung Hoi to paint a landscape using red cinnabar. Fai then placed the painting between layers of soaked rice paper and traced his father’s landscape through the wet sheets with dots of black ink, pressing the sheets together to allow transmission between the layers. The seeping of the cinnabar and ink through the sheets of paper results in copies of the original painting in varying states of fidelity and exactitude, as red and black jostle between definition and haziness, becoming more or less dominant. Hung’s creation is simultaneously an act of copying and of reinvention.

The finished work embodies the dichotomy that faces each new generation: how to show deference to one’s forebears and learn from their experiences, while also challenging the knowledge that is passed down and enacting our own innovations. Hung’s painting represents an inversion of the customary roles of the maker and copyist, thereby questioning the traditional boundaries of Chinese art and principles of filial piety.