LA Art Show 2020 - Hongbo Press Conference

Los Angeles, California, USA. 5th February, 2020. Chinese-American artist, Hongbo, held a press conference on the opening night of the LA Art Show at the Los Angeles Convention Center in downtown Los Angeles to announce the exhibition of his newest work, “Flowers Fall Beyond the Edge of the Sky” a masterpiece ink painting which took nearly a year to complete. The press conference was hosted by Professor Richard Wearn from California State University, Los Angeles, with TV host Joey Zhou and Sky Saxour. The conference featured a discussion of the painting with the artist, Hongbo, who gave a presentation about this painting.

Hongbo is a well-established Chinese fine artist who works in both China and the United States. He has developed his own style based on traditional Chinese ink techniques, and uses 'color accumulative method' to express the contemporary spirit with the abstract language of color and ink. Hongbo enjoys creating “American landscapes in Chinese painting.” At the briefing, he stated that, “We have to look at paintings with the vision. Art crosses space and time. I have come out of tradition, and have come to the present day, and it will also extend to the future.”

Professor Richard Wearn began with a presentation about Hongbo's background, and said in a statement, “Flowers Fall beyond the Edge of the Sky is the most powerful work produced by one of the leaders of contemporary Chinese Ink Art. It is endowed with a pure beauty that is universal and that is not culturally specific nor dependent upon context. The vertical panels align to create a horizontal metaphysical vista that open the viewer to an amorphous and organic experience that is suggestive of a nebula – a coming to form, as opposed to a predetermined formal organization.“

“Hongbo provides us with a viewing of a space that is relieved of rational limitation, the fluidity of Ink and the absorbent qualities of the ground produce a soaking effect that evoke an aesthetic equivalent of the quantum, somehow capturing the rhizomic distributional nature of our universe. Hongbo has produced a work that is in and of itself – and in so doing presented a universal patterning of energy accumulations and flows. Any form of tradition or system of historic organization is subsumed by a greater universe, that being the inter-relationship of action, resistance and matter. Interchange: Flowers Fall beyond the Edge of the Sky is a work that offers us a tangible configuration of the underlying energies that form our reality. It is pure and potent abstraction, a window onto the morphogenic space that is simultaneously inherent to us and the world around us.”

The other speakers at the event were film director Harrison Engle, entertainer Stephanie Spruill, and producer Douglas Ivanovich who talked about Hongbo and his work as an artist.