Tchan Fou-li (; June 21, 1916 – September 11, 2018)
was a Hong Kong photographer who worked to develop distinctive Chinese forms of photography and to establish photography as a serious art form in Hong Kong. He is known for his photographs, described as evoking the artistic values and composition of Chinese landscape paintings. A ''

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' reviewer called him "one of the great visual artists of his time" because of his "carefully crafted images that celebrate the beauty of the human condition and the majesty of nature."

Biography

Tchan was born on June 21, 1916, in Chao'an, Chaozhou (Teochew) in eastern

Guangdong Guangdong (, ), alternatively romanized as Canton or Kwangtung, is a coastal province in South China on the north shore of the South China Sea. The capital of the province is Guangzhou. With a population of 126.01 million (as of 2020) ...

Province. Tchan graduated from the Guangdong Provincial Second Normal School in 1934, but learned to appreciate painting, music, and poetry from his father. As he explained to a reporter late in his life, "I never received formal art training, but my father liked paintings and calligraphy. I loved paintings but could not paint, photography allowed me to create pictures."Alexandra A. Seno, "A Cultural History Framed in A Chinese Artist's Lens,

New York Times (November 25, 2005) In 1944, Tchan moved to

Vietnam Vietnam or Viet Nam ( vi, Việt Nam, ), officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,., group="n" is a country in Southeast Asia, at the eastern edge of mainland Southeast Asia, with an area of and population of 96 million, making i ...

in order to run a trading business but spent more and more time with photography. One of his most important influences was Lang Jingshan (1892-1995), whose photography was rooted in Chinese painting. Tchan followed Lang's example in montage works which printed several negatives into one image in order to evoke a Chinese painting. For instance, in the early 1950s, Tchan produced photographs which used the “one corner” pictorial style of the Song dynasty painter Ma Yuan (1189-1224). Although still pursuing photography as an amateur, after returning to Hong Kong in 1955, Tchan traveled to many countries on photographic expeditions, including Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia. In these photographs Tchan declared that his new ambition was to portray "the real object in collaboration with the skill of pictorial depiction," that is, to show the lives of ordinary people in vivid and aesthetically rigorous images. In 1959 and 1962 he returned to China, and photographed the classic landscapes of

Guilin Guilin (Standard Zhuang: ''Gveilinz''; alternatively romanized as Kweilin) is a prefecture-level city in the northeast of China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. It is situated on the west bank of the Li River and borders Hunan to the nort ...

and

Huangshan Huangshan (),Bernstein, pp. 125–127. literally meaning the Yellow Mountain(s), is a mountain range in southern Anhui Province in eastern China. It was originally called “Yishan”, and it was renamed because of a legend that Emperor Xuan ...

. In a 1962 essay, "Chinese Pictorial Painting and Landscape Photography" Tchang argued that restricting himself to black-and-white was similar to the three-dimensional textures and forms of Chinese paintings and that his use of space simplified the structures and enhanced the viewer's sense of solidity and emptiness. Although the period of political turmoil during the

Cultural Revolution The Cultural Revolution, formally known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was a sociopolitical movement in the People's Republic of China (PRC) launched by Mao Zedong in 1966, and lasting until his death in 1976. Its stated goa ...

in the 1960s and early 1970s was not productive for him, by the 1980s Tchan had developed an interest in ethnic photography and worked to encourage photo tourism to China's minority areas. In this period he frequently added brushstrokes to his photos, often taking inspiration from Western style paintings as well. In Hong Kong he founded the Chinese Photographic Association of Hong Kong. Tchan died on 11 September 2018 in Hong Kong, aged 102.

Major works and exhibitions

* Catalog of exhibitions held on Mar. 29, 2009 to Oct. 26, 2009 at

Hong Kong Heritage Museum Hong Kong Heritage Museum is a museum of history, art and culture in Sha Tin, Hong Kong, located beside the Shing Mun River. The museum opened on 16 December 2000. It is managed by the Leisure and Cultural Services Department of the Hong Kong ...

. * *

Notes

References

External links

Chen Fuli

WorldCat WorldCat is a union catalog that itemizes the collections of tens of thousands of institutions (mostly libraries), in many countries, that are current or past members of the OCLC global cooperative. It is operated by OCLC, Inc. Many of the O ...

Life Achievement Award
Hong Kong Arts Development Council. (May 6, 2014). A short YouTube video on Tchan's life and photographic technique.
Tchan Fou-li
Google images page. {{DEFAULTSORT:Tchan, Fou-li 1916 births 2018 deaths Chinese centenarians Chinese photographers Chinese photojournalists Hong Kong photographers Hong Kong centenarians Men centenarians People from Chaozhou Members of the Selection Committee of Hong Kong Hong Kong artists Chinese emigrants to British Hong Kong