THE CAM | ISSUE 01 – FALL 2025
Ed Wong-Ligda does not paint landscapes — at least, not in the traditional sense. Instead, his canvases are metaphors, layered with memory, imagination, and the inevitability of change. “Nature, for me, is a metaphor of the persistence of life and the inevitability of death,” he reflects. In Landscapes of Memory and Mortality, Wong-Ligda invites viewers to step into imagined terrains that are at once familiar and disorienting, grounding and ethereal.
The paintings are built on memory — though not always accurate memory. Wong-Ligda describes his works as “representations of facts, not reproductions.” His process often begins with a vivid recollection: a cloud formation, the subtle shift of color where two white walls meet, or a mountain range glimpsed decades earlier. But memory, he insists, is imperfect. In that imperfection, he finds freedom. Each painting is layered with “misremembered experiences,” reimagined to serve the emotional truth of the composition. Beneath every canvas lies a history of alternate landscapes, unseen but present.
Wong-Ligda cites the Hudson River School as a touchstone — admiring their technical mastery and unapologetic romanticism — yet his work refuses to replicate their 19th-century grandeur. “I don’t think I subvert their art,” he says. “My work is different because I’m not as good a painter as they were, and I live in a much different culture over a hundred years removed.” In that humility, however, lies innovation: a recognition that his landscapes are not about a place, but about the act of remembering.
For Wong-Ligda, the paintings are destinations worth experiencing — spaces where awe, fear, beauty, and contemplation intersect. He recalls being nine years old, standing in front of a WPA mural that left him “simultaneously enlightened and totally confusing.” That moment shaped him. Now, his hope is that a new generation of nine-year-olds might stand before his canvases and feel the same wonder.
“My hope is that other nine-year-olds will look at my paintings and have that first amazing experience in art.” — Ed Wong-Ligda
In Landscapes of Memory and Mortality, viewers find not only vast skies and shifting geologies, but also the persistence of questions — questions that echo long after the gallery lights dim.