The Path Less Travelled

Stephen Wong Chun-hei has become one of Hong Kong’s most in-demand artists by putting his own spin on one of the world’s oldest art forms, landscape painting

- Oliver Giles

As a child, Stephen Wong Chun-hei had a vision of the kind of artist he wanted to be. He pictured himself standing at the foot of a mountain, sketchbook in hand, painting the towering peak before him and the fluffy clouds floating overhead.

But when he got to university, that fantasy was almost squashed. “At art school, nobody was talking about landscape painting or even painting outdoors, painting real places,” he says. “It was seen as a very old style. No one dared to do it.”

Until Wong, that is. Soon after graduation, he stopped working on the conceptual art he had been taught and returned to his childhood dream. He began exploring Hong Kong’s hiking trails and thinking about how to capture the city’s tropical forests and craggy peaks, making sketches and watercolours on his walks, then transforming these small studies into sprawling, metres-long paintings when he arrived back in his studio. To Wong’s surprise—and that of the naysayers who had dissuaded him from pursuing his passion—these paintings have become a critical and commercial hit, selling to collectors and museums and earning him rapturous praise in the media.