Cheung Chung-Chu

Cheung Chung-Chu (張中柱) is a senior Hong Kong painter, calligrapher, and printmaker, and a founding member of the Hong Kong Open Printshop (HKOP) — the city's principal cooperative print studio, established in 2000. His decades-long studio practice combines woodblock printing with etching, chine-collé, and traditional Chinese ink-wash and calligraphy methods, and his self-identification has consistently leaned toward the older traditions: although he has worked with etching and woodblock for decades, he describes himself as a calligrapher and ink-wash painter rather than a printmaker, treating the print as one tool among several rather than as a separate discipline.

Cheung's practice is distinctively rooted in classical Chinese poetic and aesthetic sources. His most-discussed recent body of work is a woodblock print series inspired by classical Chinese poetry, anchored on Guan Ju, the opening poem of the Shī Jīng (Book of Songs, 11th-7th centuries BCE) — one of the foundational texts of the Chinese poetic canon. The series sometimes incorporates collaborative techniques in which woodblock printing is combined with chine-collé or etching, and the printed sheets often retain traces of brushwork or calligraphic gesture that signal his ink-painting background.

He was an invited demonstrator at the 2017 International Mokuhanga Conference (IMC2017) in Honolulu, where he presented his Guan Ju series and discussed the relationship between Chinese calligraphic painting and woodblock printing. International Mokuhanga Conferences, held every three years, are the principal global gatherings for contemporary woodblock practitioners; selection as a demonstrator places Cheung among the senior figures consulted by the international mokuhanga community.

His exhibition record stretches across multiple decades and continents. He has shown at the Southern Graphics Council International Conference (2014), the International Print Triennial Krakow (2009), and Taiwan's 11th International Biennial Print and Drawing Exhibition (2010), among other international print events. He took first prize at Virtually/Reality, a Hong Kong contemporary print exhibition, in 2003. His work is held in the collections of the Hong Kong Museum of Art and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art, two of the principal regional collections for contemporary East Asian print.

His recent gallery output through Hong Kong Open Printshop's commercial arm includes screen-printed and digitally-printed works on Somerset paper. The 2024 prints Drawing (素描) and Windscape (風景) — both screen prints, the latter combining screen and digital printing — show the lyrical, fluid line work that connects his print practice to his calligraphic tradition. These works are hand-pulled in editions of six, with two-to-ten color runs, indicating a careful artist's-edition approach rather than a commercial poster-style production.

Within Hong Kong's contemporary printmaking community Cheung occupies the role of a founding-generation senior figure: a member of the cohort that institutionalized contemporary printmaking education in the city through Hong Kong Open Printshop and through teaching at art schools, and an artist whose work has continued to bridge classical Chinese calligraphic tradition with the contemporary print process. The Hong Kong Open Printshop, where his work continues to be produced, remains the city's principal contemporary print cooperative and his founding role there is one of the principal channels through which younger Hong Kong printmakers — including Wong Ho Ching — entered the field.