Framed by the New Moon

Framed by the New Moon (2024) is a small-format intaglio worked in combined etching and drypoint, pulled in an edition of ten through Hong Kong Open Printshop. The title points to a compositional device in which the slender crescent or absent disc of the new moon serves as an aperture or frame for the image within — a strategy familiar from East Asian pictorial conventions where the moon brackets a scene rather than illuminates it. The combined techniques give Wong a particularly wide tonal range for nocturnal subject matter: the bitten etched line carries the architecture of the composition, while the drypoint burr — that fragile ridge of metal raised by the needle — holds soft, velvety blacks that mimic the diffusion of moonlight on plate tone. The piece sits within a recurring lunar thread in Wong's recent HKOP work, paired with Moon Shining over the Land. Both prints register the artist's RCA-trained intaglio idiom: small in scale, dense in mark, and concerned with the threshold between visibility and disappearance.