When David Hockney travelled through mainland China and Hong Kong in the 1980s, he encountered an idea that would reshape his understanding of pictorial space: the “moving focus” of the Chinese handscroll, which unfolds gradually through time rather than from a single fixed viewpoint.
That encounter became the starting point for Through the Master's Eye: David Hockney & Wu Guanzhong, an unprecedented exhibition at Christie's Hong Kong pairing his work with that of Wu Guanzhong – an artist who made the same journey from the other direction, absorbing the formal lessons of Cézanne and Matisse into Chinese ink painting.
The exhibition marks the first presentation of David Hockney’s work in Asia since his passing in June 2026, offering a rare opportunity to see his work in Hong Kong. Open to the public until 29 September at Christie’s Asia Pacific headquarters at The Henderson, it runs alongside the autumn preview and sales as part of Christie’s 40th anniversary in Asia.
With the exhibition now open, The Value invited Cristian Albu, Deputy Chairman, Head of Auction and Private Sales, 20th and 21st Century Art, Christie’s Asia Pacific, to share how it came together and what he sees at the heart of the dialogue between the two artists.
David Hockney, The Big Hawthorn (2008) | Through the Master’s Eye: David Hockney & Wu Guanzhong at Christie’s Hong Kong until 29 September
Bringing Hockney and Wu together
In 1981, David Hockney made a trip to China with Stephen Spender and Gregory Evans for three weeks. China Diary, the illustrated book of the trip, takes in not just famous sites – the Great Wall, the Temple of the Jade Buddha, the magical landscape of Kweilin – but also the unexpected incidents of everyday Chinese life, including their meetings with contemporary Chinese poets and painters. The idea of pairing David Hockney and Wu Guanzhong emerged from reading this book.
At the heart of the exhibition is the idea of artistic exchange. While they come from very different cultural backgrounds, both artists spent their careers exploring how Eastern and Western artistic traditions could inform one another and open new ways of seeing the world. We felt there was a compelling opportunity to place their works in conversation and reveal these shared concerns to a contemporary audience.
Hockney and Wu were deeply committed to landscape as a subject, but neither approached it as a straightforward depiction of nature. Instead, they used landscape as a vehicle for exploring perception, memory, movement, and space. Their works reveal a shared belief that artistic traditions are not fixed or isolated but can evolve through dialogue and reinterpretation.
Cristian Albu, Deputy Chairman, Head of Auction and Private Sales, 20th and 21st Century Art, Christie’s Asia Pacific with Wu Guanzhong's Lake Shaoxing (1997)
Wu Guanzhong and the modernist eye
Western oil painting fundamentally changed how Wu Guanzhong looked at the visual world. Rather than seeing landscape primarily as a vehicle for literary expression, as in traditional Chinese literati painting, he began to see nature as a dynamic arrangement of forms, colours, rhythms, and structures. His achievement was not simply to borrow Western techniques, but to create a new visual language that fused Western modernist principles with Chinese aesthetics.
Wu's training in Western oil painting at the Hangzhou Academy of Art and later at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris exposed him to artists such as Cézanne, Matisse, and Gauguin. From them he learned that a painting could be organised according to formal relationships of shape, line, and colour, rather than simply reproducing appearances.
As a result, Wu often treated Chinese villages, rivers, bridges, and trees as visual structures. White walls, black rooftops, and waterways became geometric elements within a composition. He reduced complex scenery to essential forms, much as modern European painters simplified natural subjects into patterns and spatial relationships.
Wu Guanzhong, Fuyang, A Riverside City (1991)
Wu Guanzhong, A Hill City
Hockney and the Chinese handscroll
While Wu Guanzhong sought to modernise Chinese ink painting through his engagement with Western modernism, Hockney became increasingly interested in Chinese artistic principles, particularly handscroll painting, perspective, and the experience of viewing landscapes through time rather than from a single fixed viewpoint.
Wang Hui was a leading painter of the Qing dynasty and is celebrated for his monumental landscape handscrolls. His work synthesised centuries of Chinese painting traditions while demonstrating remarkable mastery of composition, spatial organisation, and narrative progression.
For Hockney, encounters with Chinese handscrolls, including works associated with artists such as Wang Hui, were transformative. He was especially drawn to the way handscroll paintings unfold gradually over time, inviting the viewer to travel through a composition rather than absorb it from a single viewpoint. This concept resonated deeply with Hockney's long-standing interest in challenging conventional Western perspective.
Albu with David Hockney’s Early Blossom, Woldgate (2009)
David Hockney, Nichols Canyon III (2017)
In a 1984 interview for the Smithsonian Museum, Hockney recalled:
“This is from a book called The Principles of Chinese Painting, which, by its cover, would not attract you too much. But I was drawn to it because I opened and read these paragraphs: ‘Chinese painting is an art of time as well as of space. This was implied in the arrangement of the group by movement from motif to motif through intervals. In the extended relationship of groups, movement in time became the most memorable characteristic of Chinese design.
Historically, all early paintings, whether Egyptian, Archaic Greek, or pre-Tang Chinese, lacked spatial unity and had to be experienced as a sequence of pictorial motifs to be read by the spectator like so many pictographs. In such an ideational art, the principles of design were conditioned by the isolation of motifs, the movement of the eye through intervals, and the tying together of each motif to its adjacent motifs.
These early principles were later transformed and enriched until they reached their fulfilment in the supreme creation of Chinese genius, the landscape scroll. A scroll painting must be experienced in time, like music or literature.’”
The influence can be seen most clearly in works such as Nichols Canyon III (2017), which encourage viewers to experience movement through space and time in ways that echo the structure of Chinese scroll painting.
Through the Master’s Eye – David Hockney & Wu Guanzhong
Venue: Christie’s Hong Kong
Address: 6/F, The Henderson, 2 Murray Road, Central
Date and Time: until 29 September 2026 | 10:30 am - 5:30 pm