Biography

Born in 1988 in Xia Sha, a village in Shenzhen, China, located across the river from Hong Kong, Pui Lin Wong spent her early years surrounded by vast green lands and muddy roads, living in the rhythm of a village community of only a few hundred people.

“The time was still pure and unmaterialistic. Our bodies were our main toys.”

There, at the time, children could wander freely and explore, observe and play with each other as they wished. In this setting, young Pui Lin also enjoyed being alone and playing with small animals and insects. “I was obsessed,” she says. “I had made a little shelter for an ant family from toothpicks and scraps of plastic in the corner of my backyard. I would enjoy sitting there and sharing bites of my apple with them to feed them and observe how they moved.”

Crafting was always a part of her life. While her sisters were at school and her parents at work, she cut pieces from her own dresses to sew clothing for her pre-loved doll, copying the technique she learned simply by watching her mother sew garments for the family. On the streets, young Pui Lin invented toys from discarded packaging to play with other kids, and she already carried a sketchbook everywhere—developing a relationship with creativity that would stay with her throughout her life.

At 12 years old, which is the span of an entire solar cycle, Pui Lin immigrated to Hong Kong with her family. Her native village, surrounded by these vast green lands, gradually transformed into what is now Xia Sha in Shenzhen — absorbed into the vast, fast-developing mega-city and the landscape of her childhood was, unfortunately, replaced for towering residential blocks.

In Hong Kong, over the next 12 years, Pui Lin explored all that modern life had to offer and came to know its limitations as well. After pursuing her studies and working in a firm, in her twenties, Pui Lin decided to follow the advice of a childhood friend and leave for Australia. What unfolded after that is the beginning of a whole new adventurous phase in her life. Australia opened up a world of new possibilities for her, and her thirst to know and explore became bottomless.

Over the next many years, she traveled across a number of countries, including Australia, New Zealand, India, Nepal, Europe, Egypt and Israel . She began learning how to cook, dived into the intricacies of cultures, learned spiritual practices, meditation, and started deep self-study at that time too, which became foundational to her later journey. She started to craft and sell handmade leather jewelry under the brand Pairpairfool while on the road in 2015, carrying all the necessary tools and materials in her backpack.

A turning point for Pui Lin happened in 2017, when after going through a certain initiation in India, something shifted for her and the world of consciousness and of subtle energies suddenly opened up. She found herself suddenly aware of many things she previously didn’t know, and it led her to gradually seek to explore herself more and more internally.

Between 2019 and 2021, Pui Lin returned to Hong Kong and retreated into a friend’s ancestral village house to unlearn, rebuild, and create in an isolated setting. During this period, she taught herself metal jewelry and painting—originally under the name A.3.Lingo—and began forming the visual language that would later characterize her work.

Something interesting is how she began painting (again): “At first, I didn’t begin with painting… I was continuing my wellness and meditation practice when I began having visions. As I was in this search for my inner child, I remembered that I really liked to paint, and this is how it all started.” In 2021, more than two decades later, she found to her joy a home to live in surrounded by nature in rural Hong Kong and became passionate about working in her garden.

Her first exhibition, “Two Reading,” which happened at Tomorrow Maybe (Hong Kong) in 2023, marked an important turning point, along with the completion of her work “Free 22,” her first painting series of 22 paintings she made with the intent of freeing herself.

In 2024, Pui Lin stepped back for a year of introspection, writing, and extensive study. She shaved her head for the first time, observing the symbolic shedding of conditioned femininity within herself—a new insight into freedom.

By 2025, she returned to painting with renewed clarity and chose to go back to her identity of origin by now using her birth name, Wong Pui Lin, to continue her creative journey.

Text: Aadhya Pellegrini