Pat Suet-Bik Hui & The Three Perfections: Poetry, Calligraphy, Painting

Pat Suet-Bik Hui 許雪碧 (b. 1943) is a US-based Hong Kong artist. This free exhibition showcases her work alongside others who engage with the tradition of the 'three perfections' 三絕, which brings together the three art forms of poetry, calligraphy and painting.

The exhibition includes works by Hui, her contemporaries, her teacher Lui Shou-Kwan and others of his generation, as well as earlier examples from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Seeing Hui alongside these other artists will give visitors the context to understand her as both innovator and standard-bearer of tradition.

In this tradition, calligraphic brushstrokes are as integral to compositional balance as those used in painting. Likewise, images conjured by a poem and those rendered in a painting combine to create effects neither can achieve alone.

Hui’s modern interpretation fuses abstract and semi-abstract washes of colour and ink with simple, restrained calligraphy inscribing poems reflecting on a variety of themes, from love, to loss, to the pleasures of drinking.

In the exhibition gallery there will be translations of many of the poems inscribed on the paintings, as well as guidance on how to interpret the relationship between painting, calligraphy and poetry within particular works.

Hui gifted her works to the art-historian Michael Sullivan, whose painting collection was bequeathed to the Ashmolean in 2013.