Oil on canvas

70 x 116 cm.27 1/2 x 45 5/8 in.

Signed in Chinese and dated on the lower left
LITERATURE Hebei Education Press, Hebei, Xing Ling Shan Shui-Hong Ling’s Oil Painting Collection, April 2008, p.158.

“I am very familiar with every grass and tree, and every mountain and river……I have transform concrete mountains, rocks, and trees into mental images.……When I select a mental image, my brush and ink would have been involved.”
— Hong Ling

Under Hong Ling’s brush, what we see are not the figurative mountains, rivers, grasses and trees in Western oil paintings, but the long implications in Chinese landscapes; these painting works are not simple scenery depiction and fact documentation, but are granted with more profound spiritual missions. In the work “Blooming Plum in the Valley”, Hong Ling had integrated brush strokes, ink, lines and colors into an integral whole to depict the vitality of great nature, the dripping indistinct pictures reveal faint Ch’an ideas and strong Oriental aesthetic tastes. Hong Ling had used materials and language of oil painting to create Chinese landscapes, and combined abstract expression practices in Western art with the idea of “depicting spirit with shape” highly praised in ancient Chinese painting theory to open up a new road for the blending of the Chinese and the Western of contemporary art.
Hong Ling’s oil paintings have a kind of obvious thick and heavy sense, however, it is not the thickness and heaviness piled and accumulated by paints, but rather the thickness and heaviness of ideological content and artistic language. In this work “Blooming Plum in the Valley”, the winter mountains and trees, as well as flying waterfalls and flowing springs interspersed between these mountains and trees are presented on the grey-blue keynote. The mountain scenery looks like southern Anhui style, but not complete southern Anhui style, north and south beauties are converged in one place to sing a gorgeous and colorful autumn chorus. This is a oil painting with extremely skillful techniques, but not completely created with language and techniques of oil painting. On the picture we see brush stroke skills of Chinese painting and calligraphy style, as well as “high distant, deep distant, and horizontal distant” layout and perspective effects, as if a Western expressionist masterpiece, but also like a Song and Yuan dynasty landscape painting filled with ancient fun, the mountain souls and water spirits of Chinese land are fully demonstrated among Chinese-style brush affection and ink fun. Hong Ling had harmoniously blended modernist oil painting language, Chinese traditional culture literacy and Chinese landscape understanding all together.
In “Hong Ling’s landscape realm”, the Chinese art critic Shui Zhong-Tian said: “Hong Ling’s paintings are very fit with the artistic ideal of Huang Bin-Hong and the artistic conception of classical landscape poems. He depicted the deep, refreshing and moist landscape atmosphere of southern China, under wet clouds and hazy sky light the lush green rocks, hills and gullies appear intimate and distant.” “Blooming Plum in the Valley” is one of his most representative works. The artist adopts the Laminated Ink Method the same as Huang Bin-Hong’s landscapes, the difference is that the artist does not draft, once started his brush will follow his feelings without any deliberate and overcorrecting strokes, the unpredictable, magnificent landscape images concretely emerge through layers of lamination and dying, and color layer changes of oil paints, and his free and easy and wild painting language naturally integrated into the picture.

Price estimate:
HKD：300,000 - 500,000
USD：38,700 - 64,500

Auction Result:
HKD: 460,000