From the MTG: Design reflects history of movement across the globe

Cook Strait, 1978 watercolour on paper by Guy Ngan. Collection of Hawke's Bay Museums Trust, Ruawharo Tā-ū-rangi. Photo / Supplied

What first appears to be an abstract work is actually an image of Te Moana o Raukawa, the Cook Strait.

Here the sea and landform are clearly defined by the artist's use of blue and green, although, were it not for its title and use of colour, this structural arrangement could be read as something altogether less tangible.

Painted by the wonderful Guy Ngan, Cook Strait is held in Hawke's Bay Museum's Trusts Collection. A great watercolour by one of Aotearoa's most prolific artists.

Born in Wellington in 1926, Ngan was a second generation Chinese New Zealander, who as an adult referred to himself as 'Pacific Chinese'. His family, hailing from Guangzhou and reportedly frustrated with the way they were treated in Aotearoa, moved back to China when Ngan was still in primary school.

Ngan's family nurtured him artistically; in China he was provided with books and art materials and given a good grounding in the arts.

Just 10 years after they arrived in Guangzhou the war between Japan and China broke out and the city fell to the Japanese. As a 12-year-old, Ngan and his brother travelled back to New Zealand by ship and it was here that Ngan began, in earnest, his career in design.

After a short apprenticeship, Ngan travelled to London where he graduated with a degree in wood, metal and plastic design. Eventually he returned to New Zealand but not before gaining professional experience in Rome, Scandinavia and North America.

Working as a designer, Ngan continued to pursue his artistic practice, becoming a fulltime artist in 1970. Between 1944 and 2012, Ngan created more than 40 public woodcarvings, sculptures and murals across New Zealand. He exhibited in solo shows at numerous public galleries including the Hawke's Bay Cultural Center, now known as Hastings City Art Gallery. In 2019, Ngan was the subject of a retrospective at the Dowse Art Museum and has been back in the spotlight of late.

The Hawke's Bay Museum Trust is fortunate to own three Guy Ngan works, including this one purchased at the Hawke's Bay Cultural Centre exhibition in 1979.

Ngan's foundational education, cementing a love for the arts early on and his formal training and experience in the design sector would have set in place the key ideas and aesthetics in his work early in the piece.

Kingsley Baird, former apprentice and friend of the artist sums this up nicely when he says: "Guy was intensely interested in humanity, including the migrations of peoples across the globe throughout history and, primarily, what links them, culturally and genetically."

This work by Ngan shows his affinity with Aotearoa's environment but also a sense of journeys and movement. He captures the coast beautifully, its swift water and impossible shoreline, though in many ways this is the story of the interconnectedness of people through travels and migration. This is expressed through linear movement in the water, and landforms that seems to bump into one another, communicating the passage of people and time.

There is also much of the designer here, and an influence of architecture in the painting's structural focus.

One of Ngan's most obvious influences in his career is modernist architecture and its dictum of clean living spaces that prioritise people's habits and needs. As much as this work by Ngan is a landscape, it also seems that he has turned this landscape into a man made structure, the design of which reflects humankind's history of movement across the globe.

Baird hits the nail on the head when he talks of Ngan's interest in humanity being evident in this work. A work that moves beyond being a literal interpretation of a landscape and says so much more about what it is to be human.

You can view this work along with another great work by Ngan in the online collection available through the MTG Hawke's Bay website www.mtghawkesbay.com.

Toni MacKinnon is Art Curator at MTG