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. She was the mother of Hong Kong politician Anson Chan.
Fang lost her father when she was very young. With the support of her mother Fang began studying calligraphy and painting and in her teens, she was sent to the United Kingdom to pursue her studies. 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), Chao Shao-an 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. She bore him 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:
Past exhibitions.
2018
2017
2016
2014
2013
2012
2008
2006
2005
2001
2000
1999
1998
1997
1994  
1988
1987
1986  
1985
1984
1983
1982
1981
1978  
1977  
1975    
1974    
1973    
1972  
1971  
1968    
1967  
1962  
1961
1960
1957-8
1956
1955
1953-4
1951
1933
Awards.
In 2003, Fang was awarded the Bronze Bauhinia Star for her accomplishments in Chinese ink painting and calligraphy.