Process Statement
The photographs of Don Hong-Oai are made in a unique style of photography which can be considered Asian pictorialism. This method of adapting a Western art for Eastern purposes probably originated in the 1940s in Hong Kong. One of its best known practitioners was the great master Long Chin-San with whom Don Hong-Oai studied. With the delicate beauty and traditional motifs of Chinese painting (birds, boats, mountains, etc.) in mind, photographers of this school used more than one negative to "create" a beautiful picture, often using visual allegories. Realism was not a goal.
Don Hong-Oai was one of the last photographers to work in this manner. He is also possibly the best, having won hundreds of awards given by photography societies throughout Asia and by international juries of Kodak and Nikon.
Born in Canton, China in the late 1920s, Don spent most of his life in Saigon, Vietnam where he was apprenticed as a young boy to a photography studio. By his teen years he was an accomplished portrait photographer and teacher, eventually opening his own studio. When he was not at the studio, he used his time to travel and make photographs of the landscape. He remained in Vietnam through the war, fleeing by boat to California in 1979. He returned to China every few years to make new negatives to be matched up and made into pictures when he returned to his small darkroom in San Francisco's Chinatown. Only in the last few years of his life was his work discovered by a wider public and he was kept very busy making prints for collectors across the US and elsewhere. His work is included in many collections including The Santa Barbara Museum of Art, International Center of Photography, New York, The Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA, The US Department of State, Art in Embassies Program, and numerous private and corporate collections including Sanwa Corporation, R.R. Donnelly, Inc. and Prudential Securities. Two monographs and many magazine articles of his photographs have been published. Don died in June 2004.
How to use our image viewer
Click on any of the thumbnail images to launch the viewer. You can then navigate forward and backward within the portfolio by clicking the left or right side of the enlarged image. Click the add to collection checkbox to automatically add an image to your collection. Image tags or search engine keywords appear below the collections' checkbox and each word or phrase is a link to potentially more image matches.
