Recent years have witnesses Mojong Hoo’s rise in the arts circle of China’s mainland. She was renowned as the most outstanding female artist after Pan Yuliang.
Originally from Ningbo of Zhejiang Province, Mojong Hoo was born in Shanghai, and had been leading a moving life since 26, living in Taiwan, Brazil, Spain and so before settling down in Paris in 1965. She came back and settled in China in 1990s. Hoo’s study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière made her an artist with great painting skills. In 1968, her oil paintings Toy Series, won her the top prize at the woman salon exhibition held in Paris.
Subjects of Hoo’s paintings usually cover ordinary scenes in life. Sights outside windows, a pot of bright-colored flowers, paint boxes scattered on the table cloth, tea cups, ink bottles, apples, matches and crumpled cigarettes, are all her favorite subjects. Under her brushes, impressions people get too familiar with to notice turn into visual forms which carry the artist’s personal inner experience. We can tell her sensitivity and simple attitude to life by her restrained painting style, antiquated colors, novel yet natural perspective,
simple images and pleasant and mild visual texture. Those repeated familiar scenes have become a mirror to look into the artist’s inner world.
Hoo is a skillful artist and her works involve lots of medium, including oil painting, prints, sketches, and paintings with crayons and black or colored ink. This exhibition mainly focuses on Hoos’s works on paper from 1960s to 1990s, from which we can see her love for traditional Chinese paintings. Appearing as modern Western paintings, the works exhibited will show their Chinese roots if we explore and feel them by heart: they are not pursuing to be identical or similar with China style in appearance; they are natural, forthright and sincere. When you are walking among those thrifty cypress and fields, you may feel the warm, simple sensibilities born in China’s early artists of modernism like Chang Yu, Guan Zilan, Zhou Bichu and Pang Xunqin.
