Zhu Hong

Zhu Hong (b. 1960) was born in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, and trained in the classical disciplines of Chinese painting before building a career that carried him from Hangzhou to Hong Kong to the United States. In 1983 he was admitted to the Chinese Painting Department of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, specializing in landscape painting, and graduated in 1987 with a Bachelor of Arts, whereupon his alma mater appointed him an instructor in the Department of Chinese Painting. He taught there until 1991 and held his first one-man exhibition at Hua Qiao University.

In 1991 Zhu emigrated to Hong Kong, where he worked as an independent painter and taught Chinese painting at the School of Continuing Studies of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He relocated to the United States in 1997, and in 2003 returned to his alma mater — by then the China Academy of Art — for doctoral study in landscape painting.

Zhu works in ink and watercolor, drawing on the brush conventions of classical Chinese landscape while giving color an unusually atmospheric, lyrical role. His recurring subjects — flowering branches, birds, and remembered scenes of his native Jiangsu — are reflected in the titles of his published collections, among them Flowers in the Dreamland, Birds of a Feather, and The Songs of Hometown.

He has exhibited widely across Asia and internationally, with one-man shows in Taipei, Hong Kong, Washington, D.C., and Kuala Lumpur, and participation in the 7th National Art Exhibition (1989), the Contemporary Hong Kong Biennial Art Exhibition (1994), and the China International Gallery Exposition, Beijing (2005).