Hung Kwai Chan
After Chan graduated with a degree in accounting and art in 1981, he was determined to pursue an MBA and ready to embrace “real” life. Yet there was always a little inner voice reminding him of what he was. In 1984, instead of receiving an MBA, he graduated with a Masters of Fine Arts from Brigham Young University and was given the “Most Outstanding Student” award.
During the late 70’s, he was a keen student of cubism, synchronism, and other aesthetic programs of modern art. From maneuver pigments to monochromatic paintings, he felt like he was inside a huge aesthetic warehouse trying to collect as much visual data as he could. But even with all this modern visual vocabulary, he found it hard to give birth to a true and satisfying emotion. He began to incorporate modern aesthetic knowledge with profound, mythical and romantic qualities of old masters to comment on the human consciousness and merge the tangible of everyday life in an in differential stream of images, objects, and social statements.
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“I work mainly with aqueous mediums of acrylic and watercolor. Most of my works are figurative; they are basically personal responses to things that surround me.”
His nude figures glow with a warmth that is not easily achieved. The sense of emotion and expression can be seen with the vibrant colors and muddied lines.