BLOOM SPRINGS ETERNAL
Hong Kong artist LEO WONG immortalises the fleeting beauty of flowers in delicate, hand- wrought ceramic in his exhibition at The Fullerton Hotel Singapore.
Fragrant, fair and ever so fragile, peonies are one of the world’s most glorious flowers. With a short blooming season lasting just seven to 10 days, they are notoriously difficult to find at peak season, and even harder to bring to tropical Singapore.
Unless, of course, they’re made entirely of porcelain, like the riotous garden of over 50 yellow, peach, pink and red “flowers” lovingly recreated in lifelike detail by Hong Kong- born artist Leo Wong at his exhibition in The Fullerton Hotel Singapore. Dubbed Assemblage of Colours, the art installation that also includes poppies, dahlias and tulips is more than just the 42- year- old’s first solo exhibition in Singapore.
It is also emblematic of a lifelong passion for flowers and botanicals, cultivated across Wong’s studies and career – he once worked as a landscape designer specialising in vegetation management, having earned a qualification in Singapore as a certified arborist – and expressed through the art of delicate porcelain flowers.
EPHEMERAL MADE ETERNAL
So intricate are the details on the artist’s hand- moulded porcelain flowers and their thoughtful arrangement within a 3m space in the hotel’s East Garden Gallery that they capture the ephemeral beauty of flowers at full bloom – somewhat ironically – in everlasting ceramic. The paper thin petals unfurl, curl, droop, as if pulled by gravity or blown by the wind.
The blooms were deliberately designed to mimic nature or in the words of Wong, to reflect the Japanese principle of wabi sabi, the celebration of natural beauty, imperfections and all. “This is something I embed in every one of my flowers. There has to be a sense of a life cycle,” says Wong.
Indeed, he isn’t afraid to confront the vagaries of fate – and short- lived organic forms – in his oeuvre, carefully treading the line between maturity and deterioration with measured grace. “You see, that bloom is wilted,” he says, pointing to a lone peony resting on the garden’s “grass”. “It looks like it is melting, not like it’s starting to bloom.”
CULTIVATING HIS ART
But achieving the flowers’ natural silhouette as seen in the Assemblage of Colours was no mean feat. It took Wong over 300 hours to bring from design to reality for this exhibition, though that timeline was only made possible thanks to seeds planted in years past.
He learned ceramic art from a Hong Kong master and what began as a leisure activity became a consuming passion. “I spent four to five years researching how to achieve this organic form,” he muses. “It’s a lot of effort. When I am off work, I spend hours and hours perfecting my skills in my home studio. When I achieve a certain thickness or colour, I want to improve further.”
Wong was inspired – or, more accurately, motivated – by ceramic floral sculptures he saw while touring chateaus in the Czech Republic. “They have beautiful ceramic sculptures in vases, with really thin petals. I told myself, if people in the past could do this. Why can’t we? We have electricity – electric kilns and gas kilns. Artists back then had only a wood fire; there was no constant control of temperature. I was determined to create something even better than these antiques,” he says.
FLOWER POWER
While Assemblage of Colours is Wong’s first solo outing in Singapore, he has exhibited at luxury hotels in his home country, including The Peninsula Hong Kong and The Hari Hotel Hong Kong. In other words, he is no stranger to working with the architecture of the space around him.
“I used a lot of landscape design philosophy in this art installation. The placement of the flowers is asymmetric, which research shows draws the eye,” he says, adding that the design is in deliberate contrast to the neoclassical architecture of the Fullerton Hotel with its symmetry and equidistant columns. “So, when you walk past, you will look at the flowers and find them interesting. The longer you look, the more interesting they will become. It happens at a sub- conscious level.”
That’s the theory. For passers- by, the installation can be mesmerising for the pure artistry behind the blooms, that the droopy flowers, like the depiction of decomposing fruit in still- life paintings, evoke the fleeting passage of time and life. Wong’s genius is that he creates them from memory.
“I don’t have to use a photo for reference because I look at my garden every day. I know them so well,” he says. “It is also because at my age, I am confident about rendering different stages of life, to create flowers that are wilting. I am fascinated with the light and shade, the nuances, of a wilting flower.”