This painting is one of Harold’s impressively large works and one that is especially compelling. The fact that it is an image of a landscape is secondary to its existence as a vibrant entity of brush and ink, compressed into a roughly square-shaped format, the landscape image itself in its mid and upper reaches is framed by ink melting along the sides, and below coalescing into a dark, stable base.
Composed of a play and replay of brush jabs, pokes, slashes, touches, smudges, and swipes, the feeling conveyed is one of rapid automatic writing, the alphabet consisting of that immense variety of strokes and applications of ink to paper. The scale is established when one finds the minuscule pink-roofed architectural dwellings nestled deep in the landscape fabric. And is that a river running through, fed by a waterfall above? Have we been invited by Harold to see these images, or is our imagination just that good?
Harold was born in 1943 in Shanghai to a wealthy father, a noted collector, and a mother who distinguished herself as a singer in the Peking opera and a painter in her own right. In 1949 the family moved to Hong Kong and it was there that young Harold embarked upon serious training in Chinese painting leading to a one-man show already at the age of 19. At that time Harold headed for an extended stay in Europe and when returning to Hong Kong he was able to establish a gallery promoting and dealing in Chinese painting. By the nineties, he had also turned much attention to painting and expanding his own oeuvre, and in November of 2000, Kaikodo was pleased to mount a one-man show of Harold’s work, “Unperturbed: The Art of Huang Zongfang” (Kaikodo Journal XVII). A number of notable scholars contributed essays to the journal and all agreed that Harold’s work is nestled naturally and creatively in the heart of the Chinese literati tradition, Harold’s residence there perfectly expressed in the present painting.
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