Local Chinese painting artist Amy Leung for the first time runs a solo exhibition in Hong Kong. The exhibition "MELD/T" takes place at the Heritage Hall of Tsim Sha Tsui 1881 Heritage from March 15 to April 15, 2024, featuring 22 recent Chinese paintings to convey the artist’s admiration of the polar landscapes and animals.

Amy's paintings demonstrate a fusion of different cultures and multifold influences from her life experiences around the world. She left Hong Kong and moved to Beijing in the 90’s.  In the past 10 years, the artist has widened her exposure by visiting foreign places, being in touch with unfamiliar cultures and having developed a concern for our endangered environment. It provides the inspiration for her creative pursuit of greater freehand brushwork style. Her travel to the Antarctica not only brought her a sense of spiritual purification in communion with nature, the artist also witnessed the severe problems of Antarctica melting and the endangerment of living beings caused by global warming. These experiences inspired her to launch "MELD/T", an art exhibition celebrating nature and environmental protection.

The exhibition "MELD/T" features two main series: "Antarctica" and "Floral". In the "Antarctica" series, Amy employs her unique Seon, a wrinkled brushstroke, to outline the contours of melting icebergs with a diffused effect. She depicts the desolate yet sublime world of ice and snow with her exquisite ink-splashing technique. Wet and dry brushstrokes are adopted alternately to illustrate the melting ice in the wilderness. Her series "Waves" inherits the spirit of Ma Yuan’s works, with her own artistic interpretation, resulting in a painting demonstrating overwhelming visual space. The 'Penguins' represents Amy’s breakthrough in subject matter. Instead of following the Chinese tradition and reserving the mogu technique (boneless style) solely for the delicate and luxurious bird-and-flower paintings, the artist vividly captures the form, color and ingenuous spirit of penguins with the mogu technique. The "Antarctica" expresses the artist's concern about environmental destruction. She transforms her worry and sorrow into lively and powerful representations of the Antarctic, making her artworks a sincere call to protect beauty of the landscape.

Wildflowers is a rare subject matter in traditional Chinese painting. Interestingly, Amy focuses on unknown flowers in her "Floral" series, using the traditional mogu staining and dyeing technique to illustrate everyday beauty, such as the wildflowers. Her clever use of the mogu technique can be seen in the delicate drifting floss in “Dancing in the Wind”, the intertwining lotus and water lilies in “Ever-changing” , the sunflower in “Pensive” and the realistic yet illusory clusters of small flowers in “Shadow”. With concise but powerful brushstrokes, Amy blends ink and colors to evoke gentle sensation and convey rich connotations. She paints with appreciation and affection for every being, indulging herself in the worlds of nature and Chinese painting to bring out the spirit of freehand brushwork.

Amy Leung’s latest pictorial, "MELD/T", featuring 130 paintings from the past five years, is now available at EastPro Gallery, Eslite Bookstore, Kelly & Walsh, and Amazon (US, UK, and Japan).