Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: if you still believe that landscape painting belongs to the past, that brushes and acrylics can no longer tell us anything about our contemporary condition, then you obviously have never cast your eyes on the work of Stephen Wong Chun Hei. This artist from Hong Kong accomplishes something remarkably rare in today’s art: he manages to keep alive a centuries-old tradition while violently projecting it into our hyperconnected century, saturated with screens and virtual realities.
Wong Chun Hei does not simply paint mountains and valleys. He constructs chromatic worlds where nature and the city of Hong Kong fuse in an electric synergy, where hues never seek to imitate reality but rather to capture the subjective essence of a lived experience, memorized and then recreated on the canvas. His landscapes vibrate with an intensity that simultaneously evokes the video game screens of his childhood and the great masters of Western landscape. This duality is not a contradiction but the very heart of his artistic approach.
The Legacy of Landscape and Its Reinvention
To understand Wong’s uniqueness, one must first recognize his lineage with a prestigious line of landscape painters. John Constable roamed the English countryside of Suffolk in the early 19th century, armed with his sketchbook and determination to document his immediate environment daily. This obsession with direct observation of the local territory deeply influenced Wong, who cites Constable as a major influence. But whereas Constable sought atmospheric fidelity to England’s changing skies, Wong takes radical freedom with color and composition.
David Hockney, another essential reference for the Hong Kong artist, demonstrated in his landscapes of Yorkshire that subjectivity could coexist with meticulous observation [1]. Wong absorbed this lesson and pushed it even further. His hikes in the hills of Hong Kong, sketchbook in hand, recall the plein air practice, that tradition which required the painter to confront his subject directly in nature. Except Wong never paints on site. He sketches, absorbs, memorizes, then returns to his Fo Tan studio to reconstruct these landscapes from memory.
This method is not trivial. It transforms each canvas into a testimony of a different temporality: the moment of the hike, the time of memorization, the instant of creation in the studio. Wong himself expresses it with disarming clarity: “I never seek to capture a single moment in a landscape. Colors constantly change over time. That is why the colors in my paintings do not appear realistic or naturalistic. I want them to be more subjective” [2].
The tradition of plein air painting is thus reinvented for the digital age. Wong is not a nostalgic purist who rejects technology. On the contrary, he fully embraces it. His early works literally reproduced landscapes from video games, openly acknowledging that these virtual worlds held as much visual legitimacy as any alpine summit. This intellectual honesty sets him apart from many contemporary artists who pretend to ignore the impact of popular culture on their vision.
The Virtual as a New Territory
It is precisely this ease with virtual worlds that makes Wong’s work so relevant today. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when travel became impossible, the artist did not stop painting. He simply shifted his territory of exploration to Google Earth, creating his series “A Grand Tour in Google Earth” where he virtually visited and painted Mount Fuji, Mont-Saint-Michel, and the Dolomites without leaving his Hong Kong studio. This series reveals an uncomfortable truth: our experience of the world now passes as much through screens as through physical presence.
Wong does not hierarchize these experiences. For him, hiking in the hills of Hong Kong and exploring via Google Earth are two equally valid forms of engagement with the landscape. This philosophical position reflects our contemporary condition in which the virtual and the real constantly intertwine. Our travel memories merge with the photographs we took, the images we saw online, the video game reconstructions we explored.
The aerial perspective that Wong favors comes directly from his experience with video games like Age of Empires or Grand Theft Auto. It is not the romantic gaze of the hiker contemplating the natural sublime, but rather that of the player flying over his territory, planning his moves, mentally constructing the geography of the places. This perspective also allows him to connect to traditional Chinese landscape paintings that likewise used this elevated viewpoint, thus creating an unexpected bridge between Asian tradition and contemporary video game culture.
The saturated, almost neon colors that characterize his recent canvases also come from this visual universe of games and Japanese anime. Wong collects more than two hundred anime figurines in his studio, and he openly claims this influence. Where his art school teachers asked him to draw classical sculptures, he wondered why he couldn’t draw his anime figurines. This seemingly naïve question hides a deep critique of the cultural hierarchy that continues to separate so-called “high” art from popular culture.
The Sentimental Geography of Hong Kong
Hong Kong itself becomes, for Wong, more than just a subject. It is a full-fledged character, with its dizzying contradictions: seventy-five percent of the territory consists of countryside, including two hundred and fifty islands and twenty-four nature parks, yet the city’s global imaginary remains dominated by its clustered skyscrapers. Wong captures this essential duality. In his canvases, residential towers rise between green hills, tunnels pierce mountains, hiking trails wind in close proximity to urban concrete.
This proximity between nature and urbanity is not treated as a conflict but as a conversation. Wong is particularly interested in “the intervention of humans in nature. For example, hikers walking on trails in the distance or tunnels appearing between two mountains” [3]. These tiny human figures scattered across his landscapes never dominate the composition but create a scale, reminding us of our insignificance in the face of natural magnitude while highlighting our inevitable presence.
The 2022 MacLehose Trail project perfectly illustrates this approach. Wong painted the entire one hundred kilometers of this iconic Hong Kong trail, dividing it into ten stages matching the official sections of the route. More than forty canvases document this journey, creating a sort of subjective mapping of the territory. But unlike a map, these paintings do not claim accuracy. Wong rearranges elements, changes the orientation of landmarks, invents impossible colors for clouds and trees. “I am interested in how I interpret nature, rather than in the accuracy of capturing the landscape,” he affirms [4].
This compositional freedom transforms each canvas into an act of creative memory. Wong compares his process to building with Lego: assembling a landscape from compositions, lines, and colors. This playful metaphor conceals remarkable technical sophistication. His loose and gestural brushstrokes capture movement, the evening light adorning a mountain peak or waves crashing on the shore, while maintaining impressive structural coherence.
The Documentary Urgency
There is also a documentary urgency in Wong’s work that gives it an almost archival dimension. Hong Kong changes at a dizzying speed. The landscapes he paints today might be unrecognizable tomorrow. The artist expresses this anxiety with disarming frankness: “I really feel that everything is changing. I can’t be sure that everything will still be there tomorrow.” This awareness of impermanence adds a melancholic layer to his seemingly joyful compositions.
The 2024 series “The Star Ferry Tale” pushes this idea even further by transforming the iconic ferry crossing Victoria Harbour into a miniature spaceship traveling through the cosmos, Hong Kong sparkling below like a constellation of acrylic lights. This dreamlike vision born during the COVID lockdown years reflects the experience of thousands of Hongkongers who, unable to travel, looked at their city through Google Earth, literally seeing it from an extraterrestrial viewpoint.
The reception of Wong’s work in Hong Kong itself is revealing. At Art Basel Hong Kong, thousands of visitors flocked to see his nighttime painting of Tai Tam Tuk, as if they were gazing at the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. It was not merely artistic admiration but a visceral recognition. Viewers identified specific places, shared personal anecdotes about these spots: “My daughter goes to school right there,” “I drive on that road twice a day.” This intense emotional connection suggests that Wong does not just paint landscapes but captures the collective soul of a city.
So what to make of Stephen Wong Chun Hei? How to position this artist who refuses easy categories, who cheerfully mixes Constable and PlayStation, plein air and Google Earth, Chinese tradition and Japanese anime? The answer may lie precisely in this refusal to choose. Wong represents a generation of artists for whom these dichotomies, virtual versus real, tradition versus modernity, local versus global, no longer make any sense. He does not seek to resolve these tensions but to fully inhabit them.
His practice suggests that landscape painting is not dead but simply evolving, adapting to a world where our experiences of territory pass through a multitude of different media. A landscape is no longer just what we see on a hike, but also what we explore in a video game, what we fly over on Google Earth, what we reconstruct in our faulty memory. Wong paints all these landscapes at once, creating impossible syntheses that strangely resemble the truth.
What makes his work particularly powerful is that it is never cynical. Despite all his immersion in virtual worlds, despite his acute awareness of the artificiality of his saturated colors, Wong paints with an evident love for his subject. One feels in every brushstroke the joy of the hiker discovering a new view, the excitement of the player exploring unknown territory, the affection of the citizen for his imperfect city.
The small human figurines scattered throughout his compositions, hikers on distant trails, parachutists floating above valleys, and painters set up with their easels, may be spiritual self-portraits. Wong places himself in these landscapes not as a romantic conqueror but as a humble participant, a witness among others to the fragile beauty of the world. This humility, combined with his formal ambition and technical innovation, makes him one of the most interesting painters of his generation.
In an art market often obsessed with the conceptual and provocative, Wong dares to be simply beautiful. But this beauty is not naive. It is built on a sophisticated understanding of how we see today, how screens have reconfigured our perception, how memory and imagination collaborate to create our experience of the real. His impossible landscapes, with their electric pinks and fluorescent greens, show us that subjective truth can be more revealing than any documentary fidelity.
Wong Chun Hei does not ask us to choose between hiking and video games, between contemplation and the screen, between tradition and innovation. He shows us that a contemporary artist can and must embrace all these contradictions, transform them into something new, vibrant, authentically personal. And at his best moments, looking at his paintings provides exactly the sensation he describes: that of being transported, floating above a familiar territory that suddenly seems strange, wonderful, worthy of being preserved on canvas before it disappears forever.
- David Hockney (born 1937) is known notably for his Yorkshire landscapes made from 2004 onwards, characterized by a subjective approach to color and composition while maintaining a strong connection with direct observation of nature.
- Quote from Stephen Wong Chun Hei, in “Memories Emerge in Stephen Wong Chun Hei’s Paintings as Vivid Saturated Landscapes”, This is Colossal, January 25, 2023.
- Quote from Stephen Wong Chun Hei, in “Stephen Wong”, Unit London.
- Quote from Stephen Wong Chun Hei, in “Stephen Wong: The painter who builds up landscapes ‘like Lego'”, CNN Style, March 14, 2022.
