"Hong Bo’s most recent inkworks, the “Being and Non-Being” series, moves the artist from the specific places and structures of traditional landscape, Eastern and Western, towards a more sensuous understanding of how painters paint space. In one sense, Hong Bo is rediscovering Impressionism all over again, for himself. But he is rediscovering Impressionism for our eyes as well" ~ Peter Frank

Over the past several years, the celebrated landscape painter Hong Bo has become a celebrated abstract painter – but he still paints landscapes. He has taken to painting expressively with acrylics but has not given up his virtuosity in Chinese ink. Hong Bo has expanded his methods and opened up a new world of vision – but he has held on to his skills and amplified his personal sensibility.

Hong Bo’s most recent inkworks, the “Being and Non-Being” series, moves the artist from the specific places and structures of traditional landscape, Eastern and Western, towards a more sensuous understanding of how painters paint space. In one sense, Hong Bo is rediscovering Impressionism all over again, for himself. But he is rediscovering Impressionism for our eyes as well. The clouds of color that billow up as beings and non-beings – bodies of moisture, containers of air – bring us back to the deep investigations of atmosphere which capture our eyes in Turner’s paintings, in Monet’s. Hong Bo’s impressionist fantasies are not like Monet’s or Turner’s, however. Informed by the techniques and tradition of Chinese brush painting, the Being and Non-Being paintings describe landscapes that may or may not really be there. Hong Bo is not just observing, he is making, a weather of paint.

Even further from the observation of nature and the world, Hong Bo’s newest paintings also bring him further from traditional method. These acrylics on canvas are experiments for the artist, a “Wave, Traces of Vibration Series” (as he titles the series) that brings him closer to the textures, densities, and forces of energy that characterize modern abstract art in the West. Sensitive to form and motion, Hong Bo understands that, beneath the electric web of retinal vitality he has taken from Western abstraction, lies the same calm, focus, and sense of a whole and even peaceful nature that underpins Eastern thinking about the description of space. There can be no up or down, and at the same time there are many ups and many downs. In more and more ways, Hong Bo’s art brings us to a point in the universe where everything always changes and at the same time stays the same.

Los Angeles

January 2025