The boudoir is the anteroom in which a young woman quietly sits before a mirror, adorning and perfuming herself awaiting her love.

To paint the intimate clothing of women is to transgress a boundary in ink painting. The traditional ink is limited to the landscape and calligraphy, the attributes of a Chinese gentleman, the Confucian literati or junshi.

Ink has been confined for generations to a masculine universe. Here, Hong Wai journeys with ink to a new frontier, that of the mysterious feminine. The mountain and river landscape has become instead a woman’s body. The ode to heaven and earth has become an ode to the sensuous, the hidden, the ineluctable yin.

In the Tang dynasty, courtesans such as Yu Xuanji and Xue Tao employed all charms to entice their lovers. Gold hairpins, jade ornaments, woven silk gauze garments, nothing was too precious to lure secret love. The courtesan powdered her face, darkened her eyebrows and painted them into moons, into the shape of moths or flower blossoms, covered them in gold and feathers. Lingerie is the seductive element of the modern woman.

But the courtesan was also literary and wrote love poems, subtle hints at seduction, and eventual trysts. The poems often referred to clothing, the “silver hooks” hinting at their amorous alliances, their silken robes alluding to their femininity and seclusion; the robes hiding her innermost sentiments and shielding her from the harshness of the world. As Yu Xuanji wrote:

Shamed before the sun, I shade myself with my netted gauze silk sleeve; Depressed by the spring, reluctant to rise and put on makeup, It’s easy to find a priceless treasure, Much harder to get a man with a heart.

Hong Wai, the Shanghai-born artist, was brought up in Macao and shares her time between Paris and Macao. A calligrapher and painter trained in the highest Chinese ink wash tradition, her works transport ink into the contemporary, broaching the taboos of sensuality and stretching the limits and difficulties of the ink medium itself (which rarely lends itself to the intricate). Wai uses her brush with uncommon skill, mastering the nuances of ink as well as the wash effect. Her works, using live with live models, exude an intimacy rare in Chinese painting. They are both highly feminine and feminist, examples of not just the beauty of the female form but also, somehow, their bold claim to independence in love and in spirit.

-AP Contemporary

Image: © Hong Wai
Courtesy of the artist and AP Contemporary