Insta Reyog

Don Hong-Oai (1929 � 2004) was born in Canton, China in 1929, but spent most of his life in Saigon, Vietnam. At the age of 13 he began an apprenticeship at a Chinese photo and portrait shop. During this time he learned the traditional ways of photography from the masters. Everything was done the old-fashioned way from exposing the glass negatives in sunlight to using instinct rather than timers. Don would photograph landscapes in his free time and his style was heavily influenced by the legendary photographer Long Chin-San and his technique of layering negatives to create one composite image.

In 1979 he was able to get to the U.S. and settled in San Francisco�s Chinese community. Don started making a living selling his landscape photographs in front of Macy�s and began to receive more and more recognition for his master craftsmanship. He would create these images by taking three negatives, foreground, middle ground and far ground, and selecting a subject matter from each negative to form one composite image. All parts of the image do exist in life, but the photograph as a whole is an image that only existed in Don�s imagination. Each photograph is a unique handcrafted piece of work.

The photographs of Don Hong-Oai are made in a unique style of photography, which can be considered Asian pictorialism. This method of adapting a Western art for Eastern purposes probably originated in the 1940s in Hong Kong. One of its best-known practitioners was the great master Long Chin-San who died in the 1990s at the age of 104) with whom Don Hong-Oai studied. With the delicate beauty and traditional motifs of Chinese painting (birds, boats, mountains, etc.) in mind, photographers of this school used more than one negative to create a beautiful picture, often using visual allegories. Realism was not a goal.

He never had an assistant or had his images put together in a lab. Each piece had to be put together by Don as he saw it in his mind. His work has won scores of international awards and is included in hundreds of personal and corporate collections worldwide.. Only in the last few years of his life � he died in June 2004 � was his work discovered by a wider public, and he was kept very busy making prints for collectors across the US and worldwide.

Don Hong-Oai was one of the last photographers to work in this manner. He is also arguably the best. He was honoured by Kodak, Ilford and at Fotokina in West Germany and was a member of the International Federation of Photographic Art in Switzerland and the Chinatown Photographic Society.

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Don Hong-Oai - Photographer

This is part 2 of a 2-part post on the works of Abstract Expresionist Richard Pousette-Dart (1916�1992). For biographical notes and earlier works see part 1.

All images � The Estate of Richard Pousette-Dart

1960 The Fountain oil on canvas 192 x 142 cm

1961 White Gothic No 5 oil on canvas 194 x 143 cm

1961-62 Eye of the Small Suns oil on linen 192 x 142 cm

1961-64 Cavernous Earth with 27 Folds of Opaqueness oil on canvas 201 x 292 cm

1962 Possible Oval oil on linen 192 x 142 cm

1965 Garden Ablaze oil on paper 28 x 28 cm

1967 Imploding Light acrylic on canvas 203 x 203 cm

1969 Earth Shadow in Time oil on canvas 111 x 145 cm

1969-71 Night Landscape oil on linen 117 x 152 cm

1970 Calambra acrylic on linen 84 x 107 cm

1970 Moving Stillness oil on canvas 109 x 215 cm

1974 Hieroglyph #2 Black acrylic on canvas 229 x 229 cm

1974 Presence Amaranth Garden oil on canvas 229 x 229 cm

1976 Celebration, Birth acrylic on linen 183 x 305 cm

c1980 Untitled acrylic & ink on paper 57 x 76 cm

1982 Sacred Square oil on linen 203 x 203 cm

1984-85 Window of Fire acrylic on linen 183 x 183 cm

1985 Cerchio di Dante acrylic on linen 183 x 183 cm

1986 Imploding Black acrylic on canvas 183 x 183 cm

1990 Flowers Not Before While Tossing acrylic on canvas 183 x 183 cm

1990 Golden Door acrylic on linen 183 x 183 cm

1990 The Peacock Has Not Asked Me acrylic on linen 183 x 183 cm

1991 On the Other Side of Thought acrylic on linen 87 x 166 cm

1992 Alpha Forming acrylic on linen 107 x 216 cm

. 02.04 . Unknown

Richard Pousette-Dart - part 2

Richard Pousette-Dart (1916�1992) was a founding member of the New York School, which included Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.

Active in New York from the early 1940s, Pousette-Dart made important contributions to the Abstract Expressionist movement. He was the first of the Abstract Expressionist group to break through and paint mural-size canvases, e.g., Symphony No.1, The Transcendental (1941�42), and Undulation, (1941�42), which anticipated Jackson Pollock�s mural scale work in 1943.

During this period Pousette-Dart�s technique began to emphasize gesture, layers of paint, and evocative subject matter that were the first pictorial statements of what came to be known as �action painting� as seen in Comprehension of the Atom, Crucifixion (1944). In 1950, Pousette-Dart appeared in the historic photograph The Irascibles, depicting fifteen New York School abstract painters.

In 1947, Peggy Guggenheim gave him a solo exhibition at her New York gallery, Art of This Century, where the artist�s best-known masterpiece and first large-scale Abstract Expressionist painting, Symphony No. 1, The Transcendental was able to be shown for the first time.

1941-2 Symphony No 1, The Transcendental oil on canvas 22 x 36 cm

Pousette-Dart drew inspiration from Native American, African, and Oceanic art, as well as European and American artistic trends, and the writings of Freud and Jung. He was influenced by Oriental philosophy and American Transcendentalism and held to the conviction that the abstract symbols of painting could reveal universal truths by suggesting the mysterious realm of the spirit. In 1947 he wrote, �I strive to express the spiritual nature of the universe. Painting for me is a dynamic balance and wholeness of life; it is mysterious and transcending, yet solid and real.�

In 1951, the solitude he needed for his life�s work required him to move out of New York. In 1958 he and his wife, the poet Evelyn Gracey Pousette-Dart, moved to the countryside near Suffern, New York, where his studio is still preserved today.

Glowing and mysterious �white� paintings from 1950�51, painted with white gouache/oil and pencil/graphite include Descending Bird Forms and White Garden, Sky.

1951 White Garden, Sky oil & graphite on linen 136 x 154 cm

Pousette-Dart�s work in the 1960s contributed to the colour field and lyrical abstraction that were an important evolution of Abstract Expressionism. His later works transpose the bright light and brushwork of Impressionism into abstract meditations, suggesting the frontier of the unconscious which Jung had described. These paintings have titles evoking the magic of their radiant, pulsating, and subtly colored surfaces such as Amaranth Garden, Night Landscape, Golden Presence, Byzantine Cathedral, and Lost in the Beginnings of Infinity.

Richard Pousette-Dart�s paintings and drawings have been exhibited nationally and internationally in solo exhibitions organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1969�70), the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1963, 1974, and 1998), the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, Florida (1986), the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana (1990), the Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan (1991), the Columbus Museum, Ohio (1991�92), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1997), the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2001), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2006), the Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco (2006), and the Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio (2007), in addition to innumerable group exhibitions.

All images � The Estate of Richard Pousette-Dart

Sizes where shown have been rounded up or down to the nearest whole centimetre: