Born in Belgium, following a career in international finance through Hong Kong and Beijing, Hilde started her journey into Chinese calligraphy and ink raising a simple question: would working with abstract symbols and characters, resonate, would an audience feel something, is it art?
Learning traditional calligraphy techniques and rules of composition from one of the last great Chinese Masters in Hong Kong, opened for her the door into 3,000 years of Chinese calligraphy and the oldest symbol system in the world, a magical space where painting is less valued than poems and calligraphy.
It is in the flow, energy, and empty space and quality of the brush strokes of the works of the traditional calligraphy masters that she finds her inspiration to reinterpret Chinese calligraphy and create unique contemporary interpretations of Chinese ink. For her, the magic happens in the space between technique and when she also breaks the rules, or what she calls “the technique of no technique” and emptiness.