Exquisite Chinese motifs in the images, the iconic photographer don Hong-OAI
Don Hong-OAI (Don Hong-Oai) is a true master of his craft, but fame came to him only at the end of life. Don Hong-OAI became famous as a master of serene landscapes filled with traditional Chinese painting motifs: cranes, cherry blossoms, boats on the river, mountain and lake in the fog.
The most amazing to achieve such amazing effect of pictures, the photographer did not use any computer programs! Each picture represents only the combination of several negatives, and print your work it manually.
There he learned the basics of photography and became interested in landscape photography, which he practiced in his spare time, using one of the Studio cameras. An apprentice of don Khong-AI remained for ten years, then did odd jobs here and there.
When in 1979 the outbreak of the Sino-Vietnamese war, 50-year-old photographer, not speaking English and not knowing anyone in the US illegally emigrated from Saigon in San Francisco. In the new city, the local Chinese community helped him find housing and work, as well as to build a small darkroom.
Selling your works on the streets, Hong-OAI could earn enough money to periodically return to China and photograph the landscapes.
Composition in the photos was built in the tradition of Chinese landscape painting, the main principle of which lies in the ability of the artist to feel the true nature of what he portrayed.
In the 1980s, he was fortunate to learn under the guidance of long Chinsan, the "father of Asian photography" and the most outstanding figures in the history of Chinese art photography.
One of the main achievements of the master has become the method of creating composite images using combination printing and other techniques photolaboratory to connect disparate photographic fragments on one sheet of paper.
To create a sense of scale and space, typically applied three layers: foreground, middle and background. The human figure is located on the front or middle ground, and background are often created blurred or misty.
In the last years of his life the photographer was shooting less and spent more time in his darkroom in the Chinese quarter of San Francisco, where he died in 2004.
In the future, many of his works don Khong-AI built in the multilayer technique of the negative, which he learned from long Chinsan.
Financial success caught up with the author only in the 1990s, when his work received wide recognition. Works bought by private collectors and museums in the United States, Europe and Asia and to speak English, he never learned.
Keywords: China | Master of photography | Landscapes pictures