Hong Kong artist Wong Tong is trying to keep silk-screen printing alive
- ‘I draw on my senses,’ says Wong Tong, whose paintings, sculptures and installations are inspired by music
- He also runs silk-screen printing workshops ‘to preserve these traditions, especially in our digitised age’
When Wong Tong was young, he spent hours in the classroom doodling while songs played on a loop in his head. “I daydreamed a lot at school,” says the 36-year-old Hong Kong artist. And with lyrics such as “You may say I’m a dreamer”, it is no wonder John Lennon’s 1971 tune Imagine was a persistent earworm.
Today music continues to inspire Tong’s paintings (mainly in oils), sculptures and installations, in particular the sounds of Shigeru Umebayashi, the Japanese composer who worked on scores for films such as Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 and Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers (both 2004).
“I draw on my senses,” Tong says. “Songs arouse memories, and I paint the characters that I see and hear from my favourite films … I paint sound.”
Tong is heavily influenced by traditional crafts and cultures, and silk-screen printing is part of his creative repertoire; the technique’s layering process is similar, he says, to the layered notes and patterns of a song. Take, for instance, his silk-screen print Hwit. In this piece, Tong hears the music of Japanese electronic pioneer Ryuichi Sakamoto.
Tong shares his silk-screen printing techniques in workshops at Sin Sin Fine Art, in Aberdeen, where he has been a resident artist since 2011. In his next workshop, scheduled for February 6, participants will create a fai chun, a traditional decoration hung in doorways at Lunar New Year.
