The Knowledge Quarter is delighted to invite staff and friends from Knowledge Quarter organisations to the next in our series of private breakfast views. It will be on this occasion hosted at the Brunei Gallery at SOAS, University of London. KQ staff and partner organisations will have the opportunity to have an exclusive look at Hong Ling: A Retrospective which celebrates the breath-taking life work of renowned Chinese landscape painter Hong Ling. Professor Shane McCausland, an academic from the School of Art and SOAS China Institute, will be on hand as a guide for visitors on the day .

Hong Ling paints landscapes that are technically very rich. This is seen not just in his honed compositions of the wilderness and rigorous handling of pictorial space, but also through the complex layering of paint and effects of opacity and transparency. At the same time, Hong Ling's painting belongs in the lyric, aesthetic tradition of Chinese painting. His works embody personal human experience and values in the ways they echo the dramatic and intense seasonal changes among the high peaks of Huangshan.

Hong Ling's is a dignified painting practice in China's scholar-painter tradition of self-cultivation, but it is also provocatively modern and reflexive. These works will have an instinctive appeal for modern audiences as paintings in their own right. Yet, they also tell a story of one artist's personal development, his embrace of the natural world and his spiritual growth, and as such, provide evidence before our eyes of the dramatic social and political changes that have transformed life in China over the last half century.