The Path Less Travelled

As a child, Stephen Wong Chun-hei had a vision of the kind of artist he wanted to be. He pictured himself standing at the foot of a mountain, sketchbook in hand, painting the towering peak before him and the fluffy clouds floating overhead.

But when he got to university, that fantasy was almost squashed. “At art school, nobody was talking about landscape painting or even painting outdoors, painting real places,” he says. “It was seen as a very old style. No one dared to do it.”

Until Wong, that is. Soon after graduation, he stopped working on the conceptual art he had been taught and returned to his childhood dream. He began exploring Hong Kong’s hiking trails and thinking about how to capture the city’s tropical forests and craggy peaks, making sketches and watercolours on his