Lai Ming is a Macao-born artist. In 1940, at the age of 11, he started studying portraiture under Law Po Shan and also came under the personal tutelage of Lingnan master Gao Jianfu. Four years later, Lai entered the Chun Shui Art Academy and became Gao Jianfu's youngest pupil, receiving guidance from the master for a total of over ten years until Gao passed away in Kiang Wu Hospital in 1951.

During his teens, Lai often wandered around Macao's streets and suburbs seeking out beautiful scenes for inspiration. He produced many landscape paintings featuring old Macao, particularly a painting of St. Paul's Ruins concerning which Gao Jianfu wrote an inscription - "Sacred Relic of Macao" - providing great encouragement to the young artist. In the early 1950s, Lai taught Fine Arts in two secondary schools in Macao. Even after he migrated to Hong Kong in 1953, he still missed his old friends and would often return to Macao to attend different types of art activities.

Lai Ming continues the legacy of his predecessors, creating his own artistic world, blending together Eastern and Western painting techniques, adhering to the Lingnan spirit but not limiting himself to realism. He is skilled in both drawings and abstract paintings depicting human figures, landscapes, flowers, with a special talent for painting birds. His fresh style of painting, the blending of techniques and his exquisite use of brush, ink and colour have brought a note of perfection to his paintings.

Lai Ming left Macao over fifty years ago. Now he returns to his birthplace, where he started his journey of art, to hold his first solo exhibition. This exhibition is a contribution to the cultural development of his hometown and marks another chapter in the history of the Lingnan School of Painting, which had a major influence on Chinese painting half a century ago.

 

Acting Director, Macao Museum

Chan Ieng Hin
November 2006