Light Space & Time Online Art Gallery is extremely pleased to announce that Kong Ho has been named as the Gallery’s new featured artist and he will now be promoted by the gallery for the next 14 days in the gallery’s Artist Showcase.
Kong is an award-winning artist based in Pennsylvania, USA who specializes in representational-imaginative floral-spiral paintings. Kong was selected as 1 of the top twelve finalists in the gallery’s 14th Solo Art Exhibition Series. The placement in this competition qualified his art to be showcased in this feature.
Kong’s Artist Showcase feature will be promoted to over 350+ major news outlets, with inclusion on Google News & Bing News. In addition, the gallery will also be featuring and promoting his artwork in the gallery’s various social media networks for further exposure.
Below are Kong’s Artist Biography, Artist Statement and 5 images that were submitted to this competition.
Artist Biography
Kong Ho utilizes his bicultural background as a teaching artist professionally trained in both Chinese and Western art. Ho is a full-time artist since 2018. Ho earned an M.F.A. in painting and drawing at Texas Tech University in 1994. Since then, he taught as art professor and practicing artist at several universities, including Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) in Shanghai, China (2018), University of Brunei Darussalam in Brunei (2011-17), University of Pittsburgh at Bradford (2001-11), Western Texas College (2000), Hong Kong Baptist University (1997-00), and University of Hong Kong (1994-1997). Ho has received a Visiting Research Fellowship (2013); Fulbright U.S. Scholarship (2009-2010), taught mural painting at the National Academy of Art in Sofia, Bulgaria; VSA Arts Teaching Artist Fellowship (2008-09); Hong Kong Baptist University Fellowship (2006); Sasakawa Fellowship (2005); Fellowship for Artistic Development (1999).
Always looking for new opportunities to inform the public of the cultural value of community murals, he founded the Hong Kong Mural Society in 1997. He has since designed and painted numerous murals in the past 20 years. In addition to his mural art, his representational-imaginative floral-spiral paintings have been exhibited in more than 110 international and national exhibitions including United States, Canada, Germany, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Japan, China, Singapore, Thailand, Philippines and Hong Kong.
His art work has been exhibited in venues such as the United Nations Headquarters, Chelsea Art Museum in New York City, the US Ambassadors' Residences in Macedonia, Clymer Museum and Gallery in Washington, Los Angeles Center for Digital Art in California, Joseph D. Carrier Art Gallery in Canada, Kunstquartier Bethanien in Berlin, National Academy of Art and New Bulgarian University in Bulgaria, Museum of Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts in China, Osaka Prefecture University in Japan, National Institute of Education Art Gallery in Singapore, Poh-Chang Academy of Arts in Thailand, University of the Philippines Visayas in Philippines, Hong Kong Heritage Museum and Hong Kong Museum of Art.
His research in community murals and transcendental paintings led to the publishing of his two books, Larger Than Life: Mural Dreamscapes and A Stroke in Time: An Artist's Memoir of Kong Ho in 2016. Moreover, his research papers have been published in several journals, such as Teaching Artist Journal, The International Journal of the Arts in Society, Journal of Art and Design, The Asian Conference on Arts and Humanities Conference Proceedings.
Artist Statement
Sumptuously painted in a technique consisting of free-flowing wave-like patterns held in check by subtly controlled washes of glaze and exacting trompe l'oeil floras and shells, my floral-spiral paintings exemplify the theme and style indicative of my ongoing body of work, the "Luminosity Series."
Although I used the nautilus shell, lotus and the Chinese jade disc bi in my early paintings, I have revived my use of bisected nautilus shell and various floral motifs and given them a more contemporary feel though my use of a contrasting scheme and expressive colors.
In my recent series, I have created an asymmetrical composition by offsetting the circular shapes of the primary spiral of the nautilus shell and the floral images against the angular edges of the squared off canvas. Further interest is added to the composition through the articulation of the nautilus shell's segments and the structure of natural flora. I achieve a feeling of dramatic motion by obliterating portions of my ornately patterned objects by merging them with a background of sweeping ribbons, rippling draping, folding petal veins, floating seashells, and dancing stripes.
My composition is supported by a dense spatial field of interpreted interactions of forms and patterns found in nature. These patterns include repetitive clusters of meandering lines and portioned color filled areas that suggest ambiguous space. Rhythmic movement is created from a simultaneous growth and dissolution of both shell and flora with the background. A sense of fundamental transformation for which no beginning and end can be discovered evolves from this body of work. Contrasting colors with meandering lines, and precisely rendered floral images and improvised random patterns, add to the feeling of engagement with rather than separation from my life experience of Eastern and Western cultures and transcendental belief in Taoism and Zen Buddhism.
Life is full of contradictions and so is art. Just as with everything else in life, the images in my painting appear to have fluid meanings and even to take on different physical characteristics when one contemplates the image as a whole. On one level, my paintings can also be considered visual interpretations of the Taoist order of nature and Buddhist spiritual enlightenment because my paintings reflect the spirit or essence of the Buddhist/Taoist belief that there exists a harmonious wholeness and eternal order that connects human beings to nature and to the Yin and Yang forces that govern the cosmos.
On the other hand, vibrant color adds to the feeling of engagement with rather than abstraction from my bicultural life experience. My representational-imaginative floral-spiral paintings are about new sensory experience mingled with memories of familiar old one. My art is about the experience of transition, a sense of the bittersweet, of the time in-between, a feeling of the loss for the past that left behind, and the excitement of the new phase in my life.
Kong’s website is www.kongho.com.
