Harry Wong: Interception

In Interception, a bold new series of geometric abstract works, Harry Wong revisits his long-standing preoccupation with the expressive and perceptual power of colour, shape and composition.

New Zealand Chinese artist Wong Sing Tai, aka Harry Wong, returns to the medium of paint, in his vivid new exhibition, Interception. After he won the first Benson and Hedges Art Award in 1968, Colin McCahon described one of his works as New Zealand’s “first Pop Painting”. Yet Wong now employs his signature graphic, hard-edged style now for solely abstract concerns.

Following a 25 year hiatus during which Wong was involved in writing and producing films, and then a recent battle with cancer, Wong is on a clear mission to resolve some of those painterly concerns he had explored in the late 1970s.

“This experience has resulted in a wakeup call. An urgent reminder to finish those things I started.”

Interception, with its assured exploration of relationships of colour, shape and the subtle perceptual reverberations that result, tap into his long-standing interest in the contemplative potential inherent in these formal elements.

“From a painting perspective, the content of colour, balance, concrete form and subtlety are concepts that excite me.”

Certainly one of the earliest in New Zealand to paint onto Perspex, Wong returns to this 20th century support which signals his pop heritage and his interest in its transparency and effect on colour.

Wong, the older brother of artist Brent Wong, was one of 10 artists featured in the exhibition section of the Auckland City Art Gallery Ten Big Paintings Project which also featured work by Ralph Hotere, Colin McCahon, Don Driver, and Milan Mrkusich. His vivid geometric abstraction nods appreciatively to such Modernist Abstractionists as Klee, Malevich and Charchoune. Wong’s paintings and screen-prints are represented in public collections including Te Papa, Auckland City Art Gallery, the University of Auckland Collection and the Hocken.

Event listed by Pierre Peeters

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