Yung Ng was born and raised on the family farm in Luzhai, a remote country town in Guangxi province. It sits in southern China at the edge of the karst mountains near Guilin and the River Li.
The effects of the Cultural Revolution left her parents and six siblings working hard to survive. Food was scarce, but her close-knit family pulled through the hard times together.
Yung’s first artwork was drawn in the dust of a track to a sugar cane field, using a stick.
It sparked a passion for art which continued through school lessons and into the summer holidays, when she sketched portraits of celebrities in every spare moment as presents for friends and family.
She dreamed of a day when she could travel to a city and experience the life she saw in magazines. But the nearest city to Yung’s hometown is Guangzhou in neighbouring Guangdong (“Canton”) province, at that time a ten-hour train ride through the mountains.
With no spare money for the journey, it might as well have been another country.
A native Mandarin speaker, Yung began listening to radio programs in Cantonese, broadcast from distant Guangzhou. She taught herself the language and was determined to get to “Canton” one day.
After graduating high school, Yung moved to Guangzhou to study English. The cosmopolitan city culture opened her eyes to a world of possibilities. Her family suggested a career in accounting, but that wasn’t for her.
From Guangzhou it was a short hop across the border into Hong Kong, where she lived and worked for many years to help support her parents back home. The hard realities of working life left her no time to draw or paint, and art took a pause.
Many years later, a trip to London included a visit to the National Gallery, which reignited her love of painting and led her to take formal courses in portraiture and landscape oils.
Yung briefly studied Fine Art in Hong Kong. Then, on a visit to the Dafen artists’ quarter across the border in Shenzhen, Yung stumbled upon the backstreet studio of JiaJie Deng. It was full of beauty, and the intoxicating aroma of oil paint.
His paintings inspired her like no others. They became friends and he agreed to mentor her. She only later realised that this humble man is a nationally exhibited gold medallist and a member of the national China Artists Association.
In 2018 Yung moved from Hong Kong to London with her husband Ian. She loved life in the new city and began to paint full-time. They often visited Ian’s family in the Highlands, and Yung began to fall in love with Scotland.
In 2021 they moved back to another family farm – Ian’s this time – and settled in the hills above Cawdor, where Yung discovered an unexpected love of Celtic music, and the magical light of the Moray Firth.
After a journey across the world, through city after city, from one farm to another, Yung now paints landscape oils of the Highlands.