Cymn Wong

Cymn Lai-Fong Wong is a Hong Kong artist based in Maryland, United States. A contemporary artist, bilingual poet, and curator, she has developed a distinctive visual language of Flow, shaped by Chinese aesthetics and enriched through decades of artistic practice across Asia and the United States.

Her work has received international recognition. She was selected for the Contemporary Hong Kong Art Biennial Exhibitions in 1994, 1996, and 1998, and received the Grand Prize at the Ideco International Painting Award in Spain in 1997. In 2024, she presented solo exhibitions at the Woman’s National Democratic Club and the Arts Club of Washington, D.C.

Her publications include Poesy Spectrum Flow (2024; expanded and revised edition, 2026) and Fire on the Zen (2021), published by New Academia Publishing. Both titles are archived in the Library of Congress under The Poet and the Poem Collection.

Wong holds degrees in philosophy, fine arts, aesthetics and art education, and the sociology of art curriculum. She taught Creative Arts at The Education University of Hong Kong and later served as Chief Curator of the Airport Authority Hong Kong.

Her works are held in the Hong Kong Museum of Art and in private collections in Asia and the United States.

My mixed media paintings explore the living relationship between nature, consciousness, and poetic imagination. Rooted in Chinese aesthetics and shaped through decades of artistic practice in the United States, my work brings the fluidity of ink-brush traditions into dialogue with the gestural freedom and spatial openness of contemporary abstraction.

Rather than representing landscape, I seek to create a visual language of Flow—a continuum of becoming in which forms emerge, dissolve, and reappear. Through layered color, calligraphic rhythms, shifting space, and spontaneous gesture, each painting evolves as a field of living energy.

Within this unfolding process, Qi circulates, Yun resonates, space expands, and time flows. Movement and stillness, perception and imagination, nature and inner experience converge in a shared space where transformation remains continually present.

Blank space (liubai, 留白) plays an essential role in my painting. In traditional Chinese aesthetics, emptiness is not a vacuum, but an active presence in relation to solidity and form. It may evoke sky, cloud, mist, or water, while opening the pictorial field to ambiguity, movement, and possibility. Within this openness, Qi (氣)—the vital life force—circulates through space, while Yun (韻)—living rhythm and resonance—unfolds through time.

This interplay of presence and absence is informed by Taoist and Zen thought, where apparent opposites are understood through complementarity and transformation.  Painted and unpainted space, stillness and movement, fullness and emptiness become mutually generative rather than fixed oppositions.

My engagement with Western modern art extends this inquiry. Bergson’s concept of lived duration and Jung’s idea of synchronicity offer further ways of considering how inner experience and external events may converge. Rather than capturing a single static moment, I explore successive time, shifting perception, and multiple spatial relationships.

Through this meeting of Chinese aesthetics and Western modern thought, painting becomes a field of Flow: inner and outer worlds encounter one another, space unfolds, time continues, and forms remain open to transformation.

Poetic Spectrum Flow

Woman’s National Democratic Club

Washington, D.C.

February 29 - May 21, 2024 

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Envisual-Invisual Flow

Arts Club of Washington

Washington, D.C.

May 3 - May 25, 2024 

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