Poetic Context
Poetic Context
Poetry forms an underlying current in my visual practice, where words, images, rhythm, and space continually unfold into one another.
Lai Fong Wong (OiVong)
The Water Melon’s Mind — Dialogue between Paintings and Poems, 1997–2003
2003
Poetic Context:
An early dialogue between painting and poetry, where image and word respond to a shifting cultural landscape. Neither illustrates the other; together they form an evolving field of memory, perception, and place.
Lai Fong Wong (OiVong)
Fire on the Zen: Be Water for Hong Kong’s 2019...
2021
New Academia Publishing / Scarith Books
Poetic Context:
Poetry and image move between turbulence and stillness, drawing upon the paradox of fire and Zen. Social experience becomes an inner landscape in which resistance, fluidity, and contemplation continually transform one another.
Wielded All in One Scumble I
(At a Bush for a Rest, Then a Screech, And Get to Feel the Magic Breeze)
2022
Acrylic & mixed media on canvas
36 × 48 in
Poetic Context:
Painting and poetry arise from the same shifting state of mind. Marks gather like undergrowth, pause, rupture, and disperse—the visual field becoming a movement between rest, disturbance, and release.
“Until something happens to grass,
you are now at a bush for a rest,
then a screech, and you get to feel
the magic breeze.”
Heart Sutra Poetics & Zen Landscape
The Heart Sutra (Xin Jing 心經) has long informed my exploration of emptiness, form, perception, and transformation. Rather than illustrating Buddhist ideas, these works bring poetic language and visual experience into a shifting dialogue.
In Fire on the Zen (2021), this inquiry intersects with the turbulence of Hong Kong in 2019. Zen becomes not an image of withdrawal, but a paradoxical state in which stillness and intensity, emptiness and presence, destruction and renewal coexist.
Through poetry and painting, these tensions unfold as changing states of perception rather than fixed meanings.
《Heart Sutra心經》: Wave Lai Fong Wong (2021), p. 47
《Heart Sutra心經》: Obtain Lai Fong Wong (2021), p. 48
《Heart Sutra心經》: Void Lai Fong Wong (2021), p. 49
《Heart Sutra心經》: Form Lai Fong Wong (2021), p. 50