"The Spirit of Huangshan" is a collection of works inspired from his recent travel with his family to the beautiful province in China. Huangshan is in the southern part of Anhui province renowned for its majestic Yellow Mountains and a flourishing botanical life as described by many poets and painters.
Laitong's latest efforts are directed at revealing and exploring the problems and relationships in painting rather than solving them. A masterful painter, his personal relationship with his canvasses sees an unraveling of emotions, conflicts and ideas. Unapologetically, Laitong has no yearning for an ideal pictorial language but instead he is seeking to confront it. This in turn results in an uncompromising visual delight.
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To describe Cheong Laitong's work, as a series of gestures is to reduce its richness and lose the individuality of each painting in its overall effect. Indeed the bold and spontaneous strokes, the intensity of unconventional and contrasting colours remain to dominate the canvas yet there is something new to discover.
Huangshan is reminiscent of an ancient landscape of grotesque rocks, sea of clouds, misty hot springs and majestic pines. The stunning terrain is in itself an emotive symbol of determination and persistence; the trees precariously hang off the cliff, roots longer than the trunk, its top flattened by the wind, growing into one direction, with the wind or towards the sun.
Laitong's depiction of Huangshan marks a return to romanticism. His mature style sees an organic evolution of his earlier landscapes. The use of fluid calligraphic lines transcends volumes and forms, painting ideograms of particular views and experiences entrenched in his mind. He sees nature for all its chaotic beauty, which is mirrored in his painting as unstructured geometry and sensuality.
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