It has been 50 years since the career of one of the major post-war figures in Chinese art was cut short by his death in Hong Kong. Lui Shou-kwan, who worked for the municipal government in Guangzhou in southern China, moved to the then British colony with his family in 1948. There, he found work as an inspector for the Hong Kong and Yaumati Ferry Company, a job he held until 1966. Often finding himself on the piers on either side of Victoria Harbour between which the company’s vessels ferried passengers from Hong Kong Island to Kowloon and back, Lui had a front-row view of some dramatic landscapes. He began to incorporate the hills and the harbour into his Chinese ink art, an after-work hobby. It was from such beginnings that one of the most significant Asian art movements of the 20th century – the New Ink Movement – was born. Lui and his family were part of a cultural exodus from mainland China after the end of the second world war in 1945. Chinese intellectuals and artists, attracted to Hong Kong by its stability after the British took back control from Japan, found a vibrant and diverse society that allowed for ideas from China and the West to commingle. Born in 1919 in Guangzhou, Lui was the son of Lui Canming, a scholar-painter who owned an antique shop. His father encouraged him to learn how to paint by copying the works of Chinese masters from a young age. Though he would go on to become a widely respected artist and a pioneer, he never received formal training, and studied economics at Guangzhou University. The Hong Kong he arrived in was one where artists practised either in the Western style or traditional Chinese ink style, with little merging of the two. However, there was far more exposure to the different approaches to making art than in mainland China, which became tightly controlled and ideological after the Communist revolution of 1949. As a result, the most innovative Chinese art of the post-war period was often produced in Hong Kong, Taiwan and overseas. In Hong Kong, Lui and his cohorts met artists from diverse backgrounds trained in Western art traditions and they had access to the international art movements through books. Lui was especially interested in the abstract art coming out of America in the 1960s, which emphasised dynamic and gestural strokes – something distinct from pre-war modernist artworks. Chinese artists were inspired by their spontaneous brushstrokes, which have similar qualities to those used in Chinese ink painting, the Hong Kong art historian David Clarke explains in his book Modern Chinese Art (2000). Excited by this exposure to new ideas, Lui became a driving force in encouraging his fellow Chinese art practitioners to find new, original ways to make art. As a new arrival in Hong Kong, Lui spent much of his spare time painting outdoors, in the countryside or from urban viewpoints where he familiarised himself with the city’s most recognisable landmarks. The Hong Kong landscapes he painted, including works such as Victoria Peak After the Rain (1960) and Happy Valley (1961), were reminiscent of the art in traditional Chinese scrolls – but stood out for their wholly local perspective and experimentation, such as the use of ink to portray an urban night scene in the semiabstract Hong Kong at Night (1961), now at the M+ museum in Kowloon. From the late 1950s onwards, Lui began producing his now well-known Zen paintings. These are abstract compositions that embody the principles of Zen Buddhism as well as the teachings of Taoism and Confucianism. In his book, Clarke described Lui’s 1974 work Zhuangzi as one of the most representative Zen paintings by the artist. The bold, black brushstrokes recall the French abstract painter Pierre Soulages, while the composition is strongly reminiscent of American abstract expressionist Adolph Gottlieb, he wrote. Lui managed to balance the Western and the Chinese, the modern and the traditional, without “seeming either a deracinated mimic on the one hand, or an outdated prisoner of tradition on the other”, Clarke wrote. Lui did not experiment in isolation. He co-founded The Hong Kong Chinese Art Club in 1956, and its early exhibitions included works by traditionalists as well as those from the Lingnan School of Painting – a New Ink Movement precursor that developed in the late Qing dynasty and early 20th century in Guangdong and blended traditional Chinese ink painting techniques with Western realism and Japanese influences. Its members included Li Yanshan, an acclaimed Chinese ink art painter who had studied under masters like Zhang Daqian, and Zhao Shao-ang, a highly respected figure in the Lingnan School of Painting and a master at painting flowers and birds. Lui was also a dedicated educator – he taught Chinese ink painting at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the University of Hong Kong and wrote two manuscripts, Study on Chinese Painting and Lectures on Chinese Ink Painting. The New Ink Movement was the name given to the work of Lui and his students who fused 20th-century Western abstraction and Eastern ink art traditions. It led to similar experimentation by artists in mainland China from the 1980s onwards. Lui’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong was in 1954. His work was well received abroad – during his lifetime, most of his solo exhibitions were held overseas, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. Of 56 such exhibitions, 38 took place in the UK. Lui died in 1975 when he was only 56 and at the peak of his career creating Zen paintings. His estate has been represented by art gallery Alisan Fine Arts since 1984.