Hai Shuet Yeung was born in Guangdong (Kwantung) Province, China in 1936. He studied watercolours and graduated from the Wanguo Art Training School in Hong Kong in 1965. He has lived and worked in Grimsby, north east Lincolnshire, since 1969, and was awarded an MBE for his contribution to community and society in 2008.
Painter, poet and art theorist Hai Shuet Yeung was born into a peasant family in Xinyi, Guangdong (Kwantung) Province, China in 1936. With a background in chemistry, he was assigned to teach at Dongguan Secondary School in 1954 and was transferred to Shenzhen Secondary School as a chemistry and art teacher in 1955. He moved to Hong Kong in 1958, where he later studied watercolours and graduated from the Wanguo Art Training School in 1965. Simultaneously, he taught himself oil painting and Chinese traditional ink wash painting, a technique used particularly for landscapes, flowers and birds, and also explored modernism and contemporary art. He continued to work extensively with famous Chinese painters such as Chen Nianbai, Leung Pak-yu and Leung Chung-hin in Hong Kong. Yeung creatively used his training in practical chemistry to experiment with partial abstraction, working towards achieving the overall idea of a figurative landscape painting.
In 1969, taking Chinese rice paper and brush and ink with him, Yeung travelled to the UK to engage with the British art scene and began living and working in Grimsby in north east Lincolnshire. He painstakingly explored the interface between Eastern and Western traditions and modern painting, finding his own artistic language and form in theory and practice. In 1998, he finished his gigantic commemorative scroll entitled Culture 5000, illustrated with about 5,000 brightly colourful carp, combining the universal symbol of life – water – with the East Asian icon of good fortune. This 201.5-metre-long and 1.5-metre-wide watercolour scroll, the longest artwork in the world, was a tribute to the world’s cultural wealth, diversity, co-existence and resilience, dating back to the dawn of civilisation in China 5000 years ago.
Yeung's works represent a significant point of departure for modern painting; his subjects range widely from landscapes to animals, as well as more abstract work in which he uses his ‘crumpled paper’ technique. Yeung has also written poetry and often incorporates his verses in calligraphic form into his artwork. His work has been exhibited at Mall Galleries, Kensington Town Hall and October Gallery in London, and at Durham University, among other venues. A number of his artworks are in important UK collections, including two presented to Her Majesty the Queen, one each held by Charles, Prince of Wales and Diana, Princess of Wales, and 14 held by the British Museum in London. Yeung has also held solo and group exhibitions in major cities in the UK, China, and internationally, including in South Korea and Singapore. In 2008 he was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday honours list for his contribution to community and society.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Hai Shuet Yeung]
Publications related to [Hai Shuet Yeung] in the Ben Uri Library