Frog King, Kwok Mang Ho, was a pioneer to experiment in performance and conceptual practices in Hong Kong as early as the 1970s. He was born in Guangdong, China in 1947 and grew up in Hong Kong. Kwok was a student of the New Ink Painting Master Lui Shou Kwan, one of Hong Kong’s most seminal and influential ink artists. In 1980, Kwok moved to New York, where the Frog King persona burst forth. He says, “During the 80s in New York, the artists Keith Haring, Basquiat (samo), Warhol and others all has big identities so I decided to become Frog King”. He then opened the Kwok gallery as an experimental incubator for himself and other artists.

He has won several awards, including the Hong Kong Arts Development Council Emeritus Fellowship in 1998. In 2011, Frog King was selected as Hong Kong‘s artist for the 54th Venice Biennale, and his artworks are collected and exhibited in the relaunched Hong Kong Museum of Art.

Despite his eclectic practice, Frog King is lauded in the art world above all as an experimental ink artist. With his own brand of positive anarchy, Frog King extends rather than deconstructs or destroys the traditional media of ink painting. The movement of hand and brush is extended to the kinetic movements of the entire body, and ink might be flung by an audience member or poured from a bucket.

His calligraphy seals and frog totems are carved from rubber by a local stamp-maker and often include abstract forms that are the imprint of random objects.