WHEN the Chinese University of Hongkong came into existence, there was no Fine Arts Department.
Today there is, thanks to a sprightly man of 66 who started the Arts Department in New Asia College.
I walked into a room stuffed with still-wet scrolls hanging from closets and walls, rolls of rice paper crammed into corners, antique Chinese pottery scattered on the window sills, and a smiling Ting Yen-Yung.
RULES
At 66, this gracious master of Chinese painting is probably the only artist in Hongkong who sticks and lives by the rules and ethics of the traditional literate Chinese painters.
For Master Ting has never sold a painting in his life.
He gave me three the day I watched him at work, and told me quietly: “Many people ask me why I never sell my paintings. They ask me if they are worth anything.
SELF-TAUGHT
I hope they will be, once I die. Paints may fade, and paper on which the paint is may crumble, but painting itself will never die.
Ting Yen-yung was born in 1904. He is Cantonese. When he was 16, he went to Japan where he studied oil painting for seven years.
ATTACK
Later, he taught at various schools in Shanghai and Canton.
During the war, Master Ting lived in Chungking, but due to the fact that oils were unavailable, turned to Chinese painting.
Self-taught, Ting Yen-yung is one of very few Chinese painters who used the big soft brush (which is very difficult to manage), for painting, as well as for calligraphy.
He attacks when he paints. “I am not like other painters,” he says, “who approach their subject on paper as if they were like girls about to embroider.”
And indeed his artistry in the very action of his strokes is as meaningful as the painting itself.
When he takes up his brush – the fat, soft one – he holds it as if it were nothing. With his arm free-floating, free from contact with the table, elbow, wrist and hand move about with incredible ease and speed.
TALENT
His calligraphy is another talent in itself.
Thinking up verses in split-seconds, they are no longer in his head before they are on paper – in flowing, graceful characters that are as beautifully poetic as they are in penmanship.
Master Ting became interested in seals and seal-carving some time ago. A collector of antique seals, he boasts hundreds of his own chops in designs as unique and baroque as his personality.
Taking a jade chop in his left hand a cigarette dangling between his lips, he carves with his right hand.
But unlike seal-carvers who usually design the name, then reverse it to make an imprint on the chop, then carve, Master Ting takes his knife and promptly begins to dig away towards himself.
PROUD
This method, is unheard of in seal-carving.
One carves away from oneself, not towards. And he has mastered yet another creative art.
He is a proud man, and well he should be.
“I only give my paintings to people I like. I do not care for money. Most people are poor. They shouldn’t have to pay for a painting they might have to go hungry for.”
With children in Mainland China, he fled his home in 1949, unable to bring them with him. “I didn’t want to stay in China and paint for Mao Tse-tung.”
Asked if he taught traditional Chinese painting at the University, he said: “No, I teach Western painting. Oils.”
