Wong Ho Ching (Jeannie)

Wong Ho Ching, also known as Jeannie Wong (黃皓珵), is a Hong Kong-based contemporary printmaker working primarily in intaglio — etching and drypoint — with a parallel practice in mokuhanga and artist books. She holds an M.A. in Print from the Royal College of Art in London, the same postgraduate programme that has trained several of the most internationally visible contemporary Asian printmakers (including Wuon-Gean Ho), and she has returned to Hong Kong to develop her studio practice through the city's Hong Kong Open Printshop (HKOP).

Wong's signature technical idiom is small-format intaglio. The recent prints in her HKOP catalogue — Framed by the New Moon (2024), Into the Woods (2024), The Black Dog and Its Shades (2024), They Burnt and Fall (2024) — are pulled in editions of ten on small sheets in the 16-21 cm range, using a combination of etching and drypoint to produce dense black-line compositions of small figures, lone trees, and night-time animal subjects. The intimacy of scale and the consistent use of black ink produce a body of work that reads as private, diaristic, and quietly emotional — closer to the small-format prints of the contemporary European intaglio tradition than to the larger gallery-scale work of senior Hong Kong printmakers.

A second strand of her practice consists of multi-color etchings in a slightly larger format. The series Falling into the Water (有隻雀仔跌落水), Sitting (排排坐), Merry-Go-Round (氹氹轉), and Moon Shining over the Land (月光光照地堂) — all 2024, all on Somerset paper at 21 × 27 cm in editions of 12 with five-to-six color runs — take their titles from Cantonese children's songs and rhymes. The bilingual Cantonese-English titles signal Wong's interest in folk-cultural memory and in the texture of growing up in Hong Kong; the etched compositions render small playful figures, hand games, and night skies that read as visual translations of the rhymes' lyric content.

Wong has participated in successive editions of the International Mokuhanga Conference (IMC). At IMC2021 she was included in the Mokuhanga Ehon International Book Exhibition (Kyoto, November-December 2021), an exhibition focused on artist books that incorporate mokuhanga; her presence there reflects a parallel artist-book practice alongside her intaglio editions. She also appeared in the IMC2021 juried exhibition. Her work continues to be developed primarily through Hong Kong Open Printshop, the city's principal cooperative print studio, which produces and sells her editions through its commercial channel hkprintartcontemp.

The combination of Royal College of Art training, intaglio technical commitment, mokuhanga-artist-book parallel practice, and culturally-specific Cantonese subject matter places Wong in a small but distinctive niche within the contemporary Hong Kong printmaking scene. She bridges the senior generation associated with Hong Kong Open Printshop's founding (Cheung Chung-Chu and his peers) and a younger emerging generation of Hong Kong printmakers. She is one of the principal younger voices on the HKOP roster and her recent editions through the studio represent some of the most active contemporary Hong Kong intaglio output currently available to international collectors.