Morphing Landscape: Hong Xian’s Ink Abstraction
In the second half of the 20th century, Houston-based artist Hong Xian (Margaret Chang, b. 1933) crafted a remarkable corpus of abstract ink paintings (fig. 1). By the late 1970s, her work had reached a wider audience in the United States through solo touring exhibitions organized by Chu-tsing Li (1920–2014), a Chinese American art historian and active promoter of young modernist artists from Taiwan and the United States. At that time, Hong’s work signalled ‘new directions in experiments’ by synthesizing Chinese landscape traditions with so-called Western approaches (Li, 1972). The convergence of ink and abstracted forms in the critical context of Cold War geopolitics has yet to be fully explored, but Hong’s ink abstractions—filled with intriguing biomorphic forms and vibrant hues—invite nuanced attention, although many of her works still lie in quiet seclusion, stored away in museum and private collections across the US and beyond, awaiting their moment in the spotlight.
Born in Yangzhou, China, in 1933, Hong belonged to a generation of artists and intellectuals whose sense of place was profoundly reshaped by the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, both of which led to sweeping migration. Those exiled from the PRC resettled in the Americas, Europe, Hong Kong, and—as Hong did as a teenager in 1948—Taiwan. Migrants to Taiwan witnessed an intricate political and artistic landscape, where the remnants of Japanese colonial rule intertwined with the Nationalist Party’s legitimization efforts to reorient traditionalist guohua (national painting) from the mainland. Within this cultural fabric, Hong trained in traditional ink painting techniques, primarily under the former Manchu prince Pu Ru (1896–1963). Hong’s sustained engagement with scroll formats, textured ink strokes, and unmarked space demonstrates her early training under conservative émigré masters.
Coming of age in the aftermath of war, Hong was also among the first to receive a modern academic education in Taiwan, which allowed her to cultivate a fresh visual identity at a time when Taiwan was being integrated into the global arena (Wang, 2009). Following her training under Pu Ru, she enrolled at the National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU), where she was introduced to ‘Western’ media and techniques, as well as internationally minded classmates who had grown dissatisfied with traditional styles and were instead seeking out global art trends.
In reading Hong’s ink abstractions and choice of the landscape genre, it is useful to consider the rise of the modernist movement in postwar Taiwan. Hong’s colleagues from NTNU—Liu Kuo-sung (b. 1932) and Chuang Che (b. 1934)—were among the vocal proponents of an experimental spirit. In response to Euro-American mid-century abstraction, Liu co-founded the Fifth Moon Group in 1956, while preserving the traditional media and philosophical underpinnings of ink painting. Such efforts were a transnational phenomenon, extending across US-backed, non-Communist regions of East Asia. In Taiwan, amid a conservative, government-sponsored art scene, Fifth Moon initially garnered mixed responses (Kuo, 2000). Although the members of the group did not adhere to a uniform set of principles, their abstract tendencies gradually gained state endorsement as the government began to position their work as a radical contrast to art of the PRC. Soon after abstraction took centre stage in international biennials, Fifth Moon members gained the attention of art historians and curators in the West. The 1966 US touring exhibition ‘New Chinese Landscape’, funded by the John D. Rockefeller III Fund and organized by Li and curator Thomas Lawton, marked the beginning of the group’s recognition. The exhibition showcased the blend of ink landscape and abstraction, positioning Taiwan and its diasporic artists as custodians of Chinese tradition within an alliance with the US (Ma, 2021).
Hong’s affiliation with the Fifth Moon Group likely began in 1966, after Liu’s visit to Chicago. From 1970 onward, her work appeared in exhibitions that often marked her as a key participant in the group, though her trajectory was notably independent. Although she shared the group’s cosmopolitan vision of Chinese landscape, Hong left Taiwan in 1958 and relocated to Evanston, Illinois, where her proximity to Chicago offered stimulating, hands-on experiences previously only accessible through books. There she received formal training in oil painting under George Cohen (1919–99) and Theodore Halkin (1924–2020) at Northwestern University and was exposed to the work of Willem De Kooning and Arshile Gorky, historical Asian art collections, and Japanese woodblock prints at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Mori Gallery; she also experienced modern architecture through her husband, architect T. C. Chang. By the mid-1960s, Hong had developed a broad artistic repertoire that allowed her to move fluidly from ink to oil and lithography, exploring figural and semi-abstract forms. Around the time of Liu’s visit, Hong had returned exclusively to ink; this would become the foundation of their artistic connection.
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Waves
By Hong Xian (Margaret Chang, b. 1933); 1967
Ink and colour on paper; 57.7 x 89.5 cm
Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA
Gift of B U. K. Li (2018.359)
Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College
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Autumn Hills
By Hong Xian (Margaret Chang, b. 1933); 1968
Ink and colour on paper; 61 x 97.8 cm
Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA
Gift of B U. K. Li (2016.230)
Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College
Waves (fig. 2) is one of salient cases exemplifying direct exchange between Liu and Hong, in which the paper itself reveals a deeper connection to her interests in materiality and surface texture. For a short time, Hong experimented with a fibrous paper, aligning closely with Liu’s distinctive approaches to custom-made paper from Taiwan. In the 1960s, Liu applied ink and pigments to paper, pulling out thick filaments from the surface to achieve an unexpected textural effect. He introduced this paper to friends in the US, including Hong, who explored, in her own way, the materiality of this special paper. In Waves (one of only two works completed using this technique) Hong depicts a recurring theme of hers—water in flux—using textured strokes that create a striking contrast between inked and un-inked spaces. Tonal gradations achieved by manipulating the paper’s fibres form an intricate tapestry in which densely pigmented areas merge with luminous expanses. The irregular, web-like structures of exposed filaments add a tactile quality that enhances the paper’s physicality and transforms what conventionally ‘supports’ ink and colour into an active participant in the artwork.
After short-lived forays into paper, Hong consistently engaged in practices that marshalled the capacity of the ink brush. Autumn Hills (fig. 3) exhibits Hong’s earlier artistic practices in their mature form, employing a variety of textural strokes—with high intensity—to craft an evocative landscape. Presented horizontally, an autumnal, brown-and-grey palette conjures a dense assembly of trees resembling steep hills with jagged ridges sharply ascending. The reserved areas suggest flowing water, but on closer inspection, the scale and direction are significantly distorted in relation to the implied grouping of boulders and peaks below. This deliberate distortion creates a fleeting impression of depth: a presumed immensity or verticality of the mountains, although this feature is not her primary concern. Instead, the work evokes a profound sense of dynamic geological change and atmospheric energy. In the catalogue for her exhibition at the Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, Kansas, Li aptly describes Hong’s works: ‘there are suggestions of mountains, rocks, and clouds, but each takes on a new meaning to create a scene of unearthly sights’ (Li, 1978).
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In the Valley
By Hong Xian (Margaret Chang, b. 1933); 1968
Ink and colour on paper; 76.2 x 40.7 cm
Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, KS
Museum Purchase (1979.0046)
Photo © Spencer Museum of Art
Similarly, in In the Valley (fig. 4), Hong layered broad strokes with textured marks, forming rocks, water, and clouds—an enduring visual language she would continue to refine into the late 1960s. These swift, watery brushstrokes unfold across the paper, reflecting Hong’s engagement with gestural abstraction while alluding to the compositional conventions of classical Chinese painting. She employs a deliberately ambiguous mode of depiction that shapes vast areas of the painting through blended washes that evoke natural elements in a continuous, amorphous flow. Through her technique—intentionally smudging ink to avoid defined edges—Hong creates a surface free from intricate detail, inviting moments of abstraction within familiar contours. A red seal in the lower left anchors the composition, offering a point of focus: a visual pause that allows viewers, who might otherwise be swept up in the cascading washes, to rest and reorient themselves.
Despite Hong’s already mature painting skills, reviews of her work from this early period are scarce, although a brief critique of her 1968 exhibition at the Forsythe Gallery in Ann Arbor (where her works were shown under her married name Margaret Chang) comments that Hong’s avoidance of the ‘tellingly calligraphic stroke’—in the author’s term, a characteristic of Chinese art—was a missed opportunity (fig. 5). Written by art critic and former museum director Jean Paul Slusser (1886–1981), the review is, however, favourable of her works that align with the ‘simplified statement of Western landscape’. This mixed review reflects the limited understanding of Hong’s work at the time, which sought to interpret her abstracted landscapes—and those of her peers—within a limited, dichotomous framework that categorized works within one tradition or another.
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Jean Paul Slusser’s review of Hong Xian’s exhibition, Ann Arbor News, 22 May 1968
By the early 1970s, Hong’s paintings had evolved into her signature ink abstractions. In pieces created between 1970 and 1972, her emphasis seems to have shifted away from virtuosic brushwork and material experiments. Instead, forms were reduced to elemental shapes that subtly evoke the primordial essence of natural elements or living organisms. Her vibrant, saturated hues mark another critical transition, although Hong eschewed the presumed rhetorical use of colour, employing it only to reinforce organic, visual rhythms.
Heavenly Path (fig. 6) and Ancient Quarry (fig. 7), both housed at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Asian Art, are representative examples. In these works, Hong employs visual incongruence, allowing any alleged motifs to dissolve into ambiguity. The entitled Ancient Quarry conjures geological imagery as Hong renders rocky or pebble-like forms with black contour lines, shaded with diluted washes that evoke a sense of volume. Yet these forms do not remain static; they begin to coalesce, fragment, and morph into shapes that suggest proliferating, cell-like membranes. As these organic forms intertwine with undulating lines, their weight dissipates and their structural coherence disbands, leaving behind an ethereal, almost transient impression. Fluid strokes emanate from colour masses further enhancing the impression as they run upwards and sideways, creating an antigravitational effect. Hong’s use of the hanging scroll format provides the only normal sense of gravity, minimally aligning her works with traditional landscape painting. Her seemingly magnified imagery of organic composites in motion creates tension with the expected monumentality the title implies, as solid masses of ‘landscape’ transform, mutate, or become entirely diffuse. Hong’s titles from this period transcend those of typical landscapes, employing lyrical phrases that encompass materials from within and beyond the earth, such as moonscapes and lava, or even base materials, as in Green Matter (fig. 8).
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Heavenly Path
By Hong Xian (Margaret Chang, b. 1933); 1971
Ink and colour on paper; 143 x 76.9 cm
National Museum of Asian Art, Washington, DC
Gift of Mary Michieli Rollins (S1998.137)
Photo © National Museum of Asian Art
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Ancient Quarry
By Hong Xian (Margaret Chang, b. 1933); 1971
Ink and colour on paper (pair); each: 126.4 × 73.3 cm
National Museum of Asian Art, Washington, DC
Gift of Jayjia Hsia (S1998.136.1-2)
Photo © National Museum of Asian Art
Hong’s shape-shifting forms exhibited a peculiarity that attracted scholars’ curiosity. Art historian Harrie Vanderstappen, who wrote the essay for Hong’s 1971 solo show at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, offers the following description of her work:
Bathed in light, the variety of shapes and textures may stir memories of our own visual experiences. Windswept sand dunes merge with sensuous human form; explosions end in the drifting calmness of long waves; the texture of tree bark fuses with shapes reminiscent of glacier terrain; the vision of Earth seen from space merges with enlarged forms of amoebic existence … Any specific portrayal of familiar shape or texture plays with our assumptions. What we normally experience as heavy becomes weightless; the solid takes shape dictated by the shifting of air, up and down— well beyond our temporal spatial experiences. (Li and Vanderstappen, 1971)
Vanderstappen highlights Hong’s blend of disparate natural and organic imagery. Given the frequent framing of Hong’s and her peers’ abstract ink paintings within a binary East-West interpretation—as seen in Slusser’s review— Vanderstappen’s then novel insights reveal additional layers of complexity.
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Green Matter
By Hong Xian (Margaret Chang, b. 1933); 1971
Ink and colour on paper; 185.4 x 94 cm
Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, IL
Gift of Mary McDonald in honour of Professor Harrie A. Vanderstappen (1991.360a-c)
Photo © The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago
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Mountain Stream, Sun, and Moon
By Hong Xian (Margaret Chang, b. 1933); 1972
Ink and colour on paper; 30.5 × 68.5 cm
Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ
Gift of Chu-tsing Li (2013.471)
Photo © Phoenix Art Museum, Ken Howie
In this singular series, Hong experimented with scale by varying formats and dimensions. Often arranged in clusters, Hong’s amoebic forms at times appear dramatically cropped, with one segment dominating the paper. In Mountain Stream, Sun, and Moon (fig. 9), sweeping, curvilinear marks emerge from a dense core of black ink and saturated colours, filling the surface and seemingly depicting a fragment of something much larger. Although the title alludes to literal motifs, the subject is rather the dynamic interplay of flowing ink, modulated hues, and seamlessly integrated unmarked space, all of which generate a sense of kinetic vitality. The blues and ochres suggest radiant energies—celestial bodies or earthly streams—that transform the distant landscape into an intimate, living force.
Hong shifted gears around 1973. While at times returning to more traditional landscape idioms (fig. 10), from the mid-1970s onwards, Hong exhibited a tonal shift and a deliberate economy of brushwork that marked a subtle departure from her earlier vigour. During this period, Hong also produced sketches that reflected her interest in the delicate forms and material attributes of natural objects. Between 1974 and 1977, Hong and her husband occasionally visited Hornby Island during summers in British Columbia, Canada, where she made studies of driftwood, tree roots, and rocks within the solitary wilderness. Initially grounded in meticulous figural representation, her observations gradually evolved into studies of twisted, hollowed-out, and grotesque natural structures. In a recent interview, Hong recalled: ‘As I sat on the beach, woods, rocks, and roots seemed alive as their patterns transformed by minute.’ Her continued interest in the metamorphic status of perceived matter manifested itself in titles referencing nonvisual elements such as sound; these perceptual experiences perhaps informed her later practices. In the 1980s, Hong returned to gestural brushwork mostly in black ink, grounding her mastery of ink traditions with textured landscapes (figs 11 and 12). Yet what is palpable in these paintings is neither simply optical nor haptic experience; instead, it is the resonance of sound, the glimmer of vitality, and the pulse of pure energy that endures.
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Mose shanshui
By Hong Xian (Margaret Chang, b. 1933); 1975
Ink and colour on paper; 52.5 x 37.5 cm
Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, KS
Gift of Jean McGreevy Green (1999.0332)
Photo © Spencer Museum of Art
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Frozen Landscape
By Hong Xian (Margaret Chang, b. 1933); 1985–90
Ink and colour on paper; 107.3 x 62.2 cm
Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
Gift of Dr and Mrs Ju-hsi Chou (2003.286)
Photo © Cleveland Museum of Art
Hong participated in many international exhibitions as she—as well as the Fifth Moon Group—gained recognition across Taiwan, Denver, and Tokyo, among other locales. She also held several teaching positions in Hong Kong and the United States. Despite her early exposure and endorsements from Li, Hong’s works faded from view in later decades, her mystical ink abstractions hidden in plain sight, buried in academic and critical writings. One might recall art historian Linda Nochlin’s seminal question, ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’, and reframe it as ‘Why have there been no great women ink artists?’ This question is far more intricate, as reclaiming Hong from relative obscurity requires navigating multiple barriers associated with the history of ink painting. One barrier is the gendered nature of ink traditions, often framed within patriarchal and masculinist ideals privileging technical virtuosity and metaphysical aspirations that tend to prioritize male founders. A more critical barrier is the marginalization of ink itself within dominant narratives of modern and contemporary art, where arbitrary separations between East and West based on medium persist. As ink’s legacy—whether metaphorically or physically engaged with convention—remains to be fully examined, other modes of storytelling need to come into focus.
Michael Sullivan’s comparison of Hong’s work with the metamorphic images of Russian modernist Pavel Tchelitchew (1898–1957), in which bodily forms merge into natural elements and terrestrial flora dissolves into cosmic matter, is generative in this regard (Sullivan, 1989). While Sullivan’s observations are rooted in formal similarities, they invite consideration of Hong’s allusions to a microworld seen only through the aided eye. Even as it echoes traditional landscape’s fantasy of unspoiled nature and some of Fifth Moon’s interest in abstraction, Hong’s fluid, organic work destabilizes the notion that the fundamental building blocks of landscape are rocks, mountains, and streams. Might there be a relationship between Hong’s engagement with amorphous forms and her generation’s collective experience of uncertainty and profound displacement? Reticent with the public, Hong has generally kept her artistic perspectives to herself. Yet as an expatriated artist, Hong’s landscapes themselves seem rootless. Perhaps, amidst the Cold War era’s rigid geopolitical rifts and macro-scale ideological land divisions, she intuitively gravitated towards microscopic forms of landscape that drift weightlessly across borders, untethered and ever-morphing.
Youngshin Yook is a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan.
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Heaven and Earth
By Hong Xian (Margaret Chang, b. 1933); 1982
Ink and oil on silk; 139.7 x 80.0 cm
Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR
Museum Purchase: Margery Hoffman Smith Fund (88.20A-C)
Photo © Portland Art Museum
The author would like to thank Dr B U. K. Li and curators Frank Feltens and Sol Jung for their generous support of this project.
Selected bibliography
Jason Kuo, Art and Cultural Politics in Postwar Taiwan, Seattle, 2000.
Chu-tsing Li, Rocks, Trees, Clouds, and Water: The Art of Hung Hsien, Lawrence, KS, 1978.
—, New Directions in Chinese Painting: 11 Contemporary Chinese Artists, Lawrence, KS, 1972.
Chu-tsing Li and Harrie Vanderstappen, Hung Hsien, Cincinnati, 1971.
Lesley Ma, ‘The New Chinese Landscape’, in Midori Yamamura and Yu-Chieh Li, eds, Visual Representations of the Cold War and Postcolonial Struggles: Art in East and Southeast Asia, London and New York, 2021, pp. 9–30.
Michael Sullivan, The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art, Berkeley, 1989.
Wang Yaoting, ‘Imitation, Sketching, and Innovation: The Tide of Events in Taiwan Art History’, in Li Duojin, ed., The Cosmic Imprint: Liu Guosong, Beijing, 2009, pp. 20–38.
