Fang Zhaoling

Fang Zhaoling (, 17 January 1914 – 20 February 2006), also known as Lydia Fong, was a Chinese painter and calligrapher.

Biography Born to a prominent industrialist and scholarly family in the city of Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, Fang Zhaoling was a precocious child with strong interests in Chinese calligraphy. She received classical education at home with tutors and a solid modern education at elite Western-style schools, attaining a sound education in both Chinese and European terms that enabled her to cross cultural boundaries with comparative ease. In 1937, she enrolled at University of Manchester in Britain to study European history and worked as interpreter and assistant for General Fang Zhenwu (Fang Shuping, 1885–1941), who was then traveling in Europe, North America and elsewhere to raise support for China's fight against Japan. She studied under great artists like Qian Songyan (1899-1985) and Chen Jiucun (1898-1975), and Chang Dai-chien and attended both the University of Hong Kong and the University of Oxford.

Fang Zhaoling's experiences of hardship and danger during the 1940s were formative in her views of life and art, as the artist increasingly expressed in the inscriptions on her paintings the urgent desire for peace and prosperity of the world. Following the death of her husband, she took over the family's export-import business to raise her eight children and embarked on her fifty-year career as an artist.

Fang Zhaoling's paintings embody an attempt to locate opportunities for change within the tradition sometimes looking toward the West, but without losing sight of the norms of traditional Chinese ink painting, and paying close attention to brush-and-ink painting techniques. Alluding to both Chinese calligraphy and abstract expressionism, Fang used splashy ink washes alongside gestural brushwork. Fang also added texture to rocky surfaces in her work by scrunching paper into balls and dabbing them in ink, which she used often in her work through the 1980s and beyond. She took part in a considerable number of international exhibitions, and was inspired by her extensive travels in Japan, America, Europe and Asia in the second half of the twentieth century. She returned to China (Shanghai, Beijing, Nanjing and Hefei) more frequently in the 1970s.

Fang continued to work throughout her 80s, and in 1996 received an honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of Hong Kong. She held her first solo show at the Fung Ping Shan Library in 1955, University of Hong Kong. The artist later donated a considerable number of her art works to the University of Hong Kong. In 2005, Fang donated 42 of her paintings to the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. These are housed alongside a joint piece that she painted with Zhang Daqian.

Personal life Fang knew Fang Shin-hau (方心誥; 1913 – 1950), the son of well-known anti-Japanese general Fang Zhenwu, when she was studying in the UK and married him in 1938. They had eight children. Fang escaped with her family to Guilin, Tianjin and Shanghai in China due to war and resettled in Hong Kong in 1948. She was widowed in 1950. Her eight children were: John Fang — lawyer Anson Chan — first local to have served as the Chief Secretary of colonial Hong Kong; She also acted as Governor of Hong Kong and previously served as Chief Secretary for Administration as well as an elected Legislative Councillor of Hong Kong Lu Fang Ningsheng — President of a travel company and honorary president of Hong Kong–Shanghai Cultural Exchange Association Philip Fang — Hong Kong simultaneous interpretation specialist; once served as chief of the UN Chinese interpretation section (deceased) Fang Kwai-sang — banker Fang Lam-sang — travel company manager Frank Fang — medical doctor David Fang — Orthopaedist; chairman of Hong Kong Academy of Medicine

Current exhibitions Women + Ink | China + Hong Kong Lui Shou-kwan Pioneer of New Ink: A Centenary Celebration