Cymn Wong

As a mixed media artist and bilingual poet, Cymn Lai Fong Wong 黃千芳 grew up in Hong Kong and currently resides in Maryland of the United States; Wong had been named the Chosen Artists for Winning Entry at the Contemporary Hong Kong Art Biennial Exhibitions, 1994, 1996, 1998, and honored with the Ideco International Painting Award in Spain (the Grand Prize) in 1997. This Spring, Lai Fong debuts her solo art exhibitions respectively at the Woman's National Democratic Club and Arts Club in Washington in 2024.

With extensive publications on poetry and fine art, Wong’s lifelong commitments to bilingual poetry and expanded visual art works have been internationally recognized, whereas her Artwork and English poetry anthologies FIRE ON THE ZEN (2021) and POESY SPECTRUM FLOW (2024), published by the New Academia Publishing in Washington, have recently been archived by the Library of Congress, under The Poet and the Poem.

Subsequent to earning her first degree on philosophy, Wong received her B.F.A. at Washington State University, a M.Ed. in aesthetics & art education in Bristol University of the United Kingdom, and a Ph.D. in sociology of art curriculum at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.  Academically, Wong served as lecturer at The Education University of Hong Kong in creative arts; furthermore, Cymn served as chief curator for The Airport Authority Hong Kong.  Lai Fong is currently presiding the Moonz Art Creative Centre, which have been producing lines of artistic fashions and installing art in different series over the years.

My mixed media paintings are developed alongside with pastel, crayon, acrylic and ink. In heritage of Chinese inkbrush calligraphy, I wield various free and fluent but forceful stroke and wash on canvas, and in case, collaged with traditional Chinese papier-mâché.  When I immerse myself in presenting art and poetry as extrinsic “landscape” and intrinsic “soundscape”, the brushstrokes are given fresh impetus by a single-unity involvement.  Every brushstroke reflects an outer and inner state of holistic creativity.  Meanwhile, this embodied experience opens up a transformation and imagination of mindful senses.  By embracing plainness, simplicity and intimacy, my art emerges insights for cultivating a cross-boundary ecological ethos.

With respect in a general sense of traditional Chinese and Western modern art perspectives, I attempt to vitalize certain built-in imageries and present the visual world in a dynamic interaction for human relations with the environment and the universe.

Over decades of uncertainties in life, I finally unearth my soul karma in my Washington saloon that spearheads to create a masterful style suited of American ethos.  The ethos showcases an achievement in self-realization of aesthetic preferences for both Eastern and Western art.  In retrospect about the reciprocity between poetry and art, my artistic attainments are stepping into a vivid oasis that I have never been otherwise encounter.

Leaving blank spatiality (留白) takes a significant part of my painting. Upholding blank space (white), in traditional Chinese painting, signifies an emptiness as another side of solidity (black).  In a very real sense of "blank space", actually it is not a “space in vacuum”.  That is a part of painting but without painting, or being an expression but  unexpressive.  On one hand, it hints to represent the sky, the cloud, the mist, the water to depict stillness of the nature.  On the other hand, it creates an open-ended ambiguity to present various possibilities on a boundless space which allows the free flowing of Chi (“Qi” in Chinese pinyin 氣, it means vital impetus) and Wen (Yun in pinyin 韻, vital rhythm).

The ancient Taoist philosopher Laozi (571-471BC) states, “Knowing the white, retaining the black, it is the form of the world.”  Thus, Yin (dynamics for unpainted negative) and Yang (reactionary for painted positive) are contradictory but also self satisfactorily in complement on mutual resonance.  Both the growth and expansion of Chi in space and rhythm extension of Wen in time are brought up calm and quiet energy by liveliness with vitality(氣韻生動), ever reveling in its vigor and spirit to keep pace with the universe that is indulged in a panoramic view of the pictorial scene. 

In exploring the essence of Western modern art, I have been triggered, under my work, an existential feeling by constantly digging out every dream-like image in subconsciousness.  My paintings indeed devote into an artistic architecture that leads me to iterate over various visual elements based on both Bergson’s “Fluid Experience” and Carl Jung’s “Synchronicity”.   Taking this perspective, the dual dynamic fulfills a phenomenological approach in art.  It manifests that the intrinsic state of mind and moving events of the extrinsic world are being simultaneously coincided to vitalize mind-wandering imageries.

I extend these two theories in complementing with Zen and Taoist insights, practically, through a fluid and impromptu direction.  Not coincidentally, both traditional Chinese as well as Western modern artists are inclined to capture successive time instead of a specific moment in a visual scene on the correlation between internal and external view.  It includes elements identified by uncovering unintended but vivid effects, plotting in trajectories of art associated with floating sight and multi-layer perspectives of a viewer in a shifting position.