It is difficult to imagine a painter working in the torturously intense discipline of super-realistic art to aspire to the fluid lyricism of Chinese classical poetry. And yet it is precisely a lyricism of this nature that has sustained Szeto Keung through his long years of art-labour.

It is in celebration of the permanence of things of this world that one devotes ones attention to its every nuance of shade and color. The image one creates must stand the test of the tightest scrutiny. The artistic endeavor would ultimately triumph over time and decay. When time reduces life to dust, only the image of reality, its illusion, remains to testify the hubris of such an enterprise. It testifies also of the life and years spent at the canvas.

So it is perhaps an obsession with the fear of impermanence that drives the artist. And yet in the poetry that moves Szeto, it is the celebration of impermanence, the appreciation of the beauty of sadness that makes life so precious. How should one then assess the position of Szeto in the field of realist painting?

The idea of realism was fashionable among Chinese artists of the previous generation. In Szeto's art training, one formative influence was the Lingnam School, which to greater degree among the traditionalists stressed the faithful study of nature. This was intended as a tool to sharpen artistic sensitivity, and was not meant to he an intellectual tool. When Szeto moved to New York, Super-Realism was the rage, and the new technical challenge became a goal. He excelled, then gradually the challenge of technique was refined by him into an intellectual pursuit.

The illusion of the real object in Szeto's art is never more illusory than the professed poetic references he makes of them. The fluid world of classical poetry truly becomes an ironic un-reality in the face of such fastidious handiwork. And on the other hand, for one brought up in classical literature, the Super-Realist artwork is an insurmountable object in the imagination. The illusion Szeto points to here is that of cultures. Szeto has made the visual world of Western art, which has a philosophical tradition that excels in dealing with the problems of illusory space, a strange anecdote of Chinese literature.

This discrepancy in sensibility that comes about with cultural differences is one that is only too common in contemporary life, but it take the extreme obsession and the superlative skills of an artist like Szeto to bring it to focus. As an emigre artist living in New York, Szeto should only be too aware of the illusory distance he is from China. But then again, perhaps for him the fleeting sadness of Tang poetry is a reality even closer than home.

Tsong-zung Chang

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