![Painting, Le chat d'Escher, Wong Wa](https://media.artsper.com/artwork/1988469_1_grid.jpg)
![Wong Wa](https://media.artsper.com/artwork/1484991_1_s.jpg)
Wong Wa
Biography
Wong Wa was born in 1953 in the coastal province of Fujian into a family of artists and teachers. He showed great interest in the plastic arts from an early age, and as a teenager began to learn from great artists in various fields: painting, calligraphy, seal engraving, sculpture and western painting. Then for four years he was employed by the Municipal Cultural Center of Fuzhou, capital of his native province.
In 1978, he decided to leave China for Hong Kong, a city that constitutes a bridge, both intellectually and architecturally, between the East and the West. For seven years, he worked in advertising and produced a number of film posters for the Hong Kong Production Company. During this period, he also deepened his knowledge of calligraphy and seals and regularly published a critical column on the subject in a magazine.
From 1980 onwards he produced his first series of sculptures.
In 1984, Wong Wa decided to emigrate again to France.
There, for 16 years, he produced a number of works, stimulated and inspired by the theories and works of the various Western art movements. It is always with great humility that he follows or is interested in the great masters of his time.
He is always impregnated with the rich cultural, literary, aesthetic and philosophical tradition and in particular with the ancient philosophical current of Taoism; he therefore continues his work, both isolated and protected from competition, in this spirit, without worrying too much about fame and economic success.
Because of his position as a Chinese artist living in the West, he is necessarily on the fringe of the artistic currents of the West, their evolution and their approach. Residing outside of China, he was also able to avoid the commercial temptation to make crafts. This is how Wong Wa expresses the fruit of his personal research in his works.
In his works, Wong Wa combines his research in the field of calligraphy (in terms of ideograms and techniques) with a conceptual research that links him to modern art. He leads the viewer in search of a legible and identifiable object (the character) to an illegible object. This is why his works are on the border between modern painting and calligraphy, while always remaining, by a movement of return, works of calligraphy, because it will ultimately be possible for a Chinese connoisseur to truly "read" them, his goal being to achieve a pure visual emotion. Moreover, his calligraphic approach takes the viewer on a second visual journey: that of a return to the past, thanks to these ancient scripts, known, appreciated and much studied in China by calligraphers and historians alike: the sigillary script (a style currently reserved for seals).
Wong Wa is a graduate of the Fine Arts in China and lives and works in Paris.
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