Stephen Wong Chun Hei and Chow Chun Fai at Tang Contemporary

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In Stephen Wong Chun Hei’s paintings, the city of Hong Kong reflects artificial, supernatural, and even gaudy colors. Indeed, it is as if nature and the city are both plugged into the same electrical outlet, reflecting the same neon shimmer and shine. Meretricious Hong Kong is still, however, distinguished from a once insouciant nature that now exhibits its own razzle-dazzle because of its proximity to the city. 

The city represents both the transgression and transcendence of nature, along with its exultation of nature. The city was implanted within a natural environment and the perception of nature is transformed and heightened for the urban viewer by the relationship. This is apparent as well in his new paintings in A Mirage of a Shining City, at Tang Contemporary, which is based on the Fo Tan area of Hong Kong, once an industrial center now occupied primarily by artists and where he and his partner for this show, Chow Chun Fai, reside.

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In Wong’s work, super-enriched colors are enhanced with a type of luminescence, and the real presence of the city accentuates the élan vital we may not fully sense when we engage nature on its own terms. Although Wong enjoys hiking and sketching before coming back to his studio to paint, he was apparently inspired during the pandemic by satellite images from Google Earth, and by painting from above the reciprocal power relationship between the natural environment and human construction (according to a profit-driven motive) can be more keenly discerned. It is significant in his work that along with various human-made structures such as domiciles and institutions, hiking trails and means to escape the city for the mountains are often presented.

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More than anything, we are engaged by the colors and forms of these paintings. According to Edmund Burke, the beauty in art causes one to want to own it; the sublime astonishes and awes the viewer into a state of speechlessness. It is the artificial radiance of the paintings which arrests our attention and brings the experience of the city to us in a flash of recognition without the mediation of language. 

The artist holds a mirror up to reflect the most fulfilling experiences of the city to us, minus the poverty, suffering, struggle and conflict (which cannot be seen from a bird’s eye view). Perhaps the paintings are an attempt to suggest that even the more troubling aspects of the city add to its energy and excitement and are a challenge for us to pursue more meaningful and humane engagement in the city.

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By focusing on the interrelationship between Hong Kong and its surrounding countryside and imputing a type of video game animism to both, Wong helps save the relevance of the ancient art of landscape painting. He adds an extra dimension to the “Dream Journey” in traditional Chinese painting. Although inspired by David Hockney’s experiments with the landscape, he brings his understanding of the nature of Hong Kong and its challenges to infuse these paintings with a different meaning from Hockney’s countryside images. 

How does the transcendence of Hong Kong as an especially dynamic world city alter our perception of and need for nature? After all, biodiversity has been losing ground in Hong Kong since the early 1970s. Is Hong Kong moving toward a sustainable relationship between the city and surrounding environs?

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If Wong’s work presents a type of subjective mirage dealing with Hong Kong and Fo Tan, Chow Chun Fai follows with his own fantasy creations within the city drawing upon Hong Kong as a nostalgic stage for well-known and classic films. Chow dives into the popular genre of Hong Kong Cinema which has reflected the complex moral and social ambiguities of the city as well as helped shape or reinforce expectations for life in Hong Kong for many in and outside the city. As a tip of the hat to his friend, Chow borrows from Wong’s supercharged palette to reference various scenes or characters from films in contemporary Hong Kong.

In one painting we see the Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung characters from Wong Kar Wai’s film masterpiece In the Mood for Love. The film attempted to capture the ethos of a lost Hong Kong from the 1960s, as a setting for a story about the loss of companionship and compassionate love. Chow shows the fictional characters in contemporary Hong Kong (the first 7-Eleven came to Hong Kong in 1981, long after the setting of the film). 

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The city is portrayed as something relatively permanent while a deep but ephemeral moment of grief occurs within it. Or, is the grief meant to be portrayed as relatively permanent as well, as the characters have reappeared suddenly in contemporary Hong Kong, even though they separate and never reunite again in the actual film? Are all of these film characters interlopers in contemporary Hong Kong? We even see Travis Bickle from Scorsese’s Taxi Driver walking toward a traditional Hong Kong taxi to begin his day.

More than one canvas is given over to the 1990s comedy The God of Cookery. This is a romantic comedy in which Temple Street Market factors largely. It involves everything from beef balls to the Hong Kong triad to Shaolin monks in an epic journey for one character toward both greater humanity and greater cooking skills (there seems to be a correlation in the film between the goodness of one’s heart and one’s ability to provide culinary excellence). We see various scenes from the film depicted at one time in the vicinity of a 7-Eleven, which seems to represent to Chow an aspect of Hong Kong’s current state of being. They do seem to be everywhere in this city.

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So what might it mean to have these interlopers from past films appearing now? Obviously and literally these characters show the changes Hong Kong has been through and they point to changes yet to come. They also might represent the timeless values of Hong Kong and how the people of this unique city created their own culture as a blend of ethnicities, cultures and motives. 

So both mirages (the outside and inside mirages of the city) allude to something very real – Hong Kong has been and will continue to be a world-class city that radiates with its own unique and often otherworldly brightness.

Joan Miro: The Poetry of Everyday Life (Hong Kong Museum of Art)

Joan Prats, one of Miró’s dearest friends, once said, “When I pick up a stone it’s a stone. When Miró picks up a stone it’s a Miró.” To a great extent this show at the Hong Kong Museum of Art is about the inevitable process of the objective world becoming transformed by the artist, who then shares this new world with us and encourages us to transform our own worlds for the sake of deriving greater meaning and understanding. 

In Miró’s work, it is as if images have broken free from nature to enter the world of our consciousness. The images break free from nature and transform themselves to become a language that we understand more deeply. Miró makes us believe that there is something about objects in the world that make them want to break free and change for us. The world and our minds naturally collaborate in a process whereby we better see and document our inner lives and the changes necessary in them.

The show at the Hong Kong Museum of Art reveals more clearly what Miró was doing from his very first paintings, which were inspired by the farm where he spent much time. Miró always relished using the ordinary in unexpected ways which transformed the ordinary into poetry. He liked using many of the same common images over and over again, and if you look closely, much of his work is not completely abstract, but abstracted versions of real things. 

Miró seemed to especially like depicting ladders, birds, animals, stars and women. Miró also typically uses colors to balance each other. Red balances black, green balances red. Miró said the initial “mark” or impulse to put paint on a canvas was instinctive for him. From the initial mark-making a sequence would naturally follow.

When we enter the exhibit there is a dark room in which you can lie down on a beanbag chair and stare up at a domed ceiling showing various Miró -inspired constellations. Of course, constellations are prime examples of how we take the “objective” world and make it subjective. Each constellation is an interpretation based on a collection of stars which evokes myth or folklore or the natural world. Stories can be imputed to constellations. 

When I am in a strange city but look up at the sky and see Orion the hunter pulling back on his bow, I actually feel comforted. I believe this room is primarily meant for children who come to this exhibit, and I think children are the ones who might appreciate Miró the most. I think children can get Miró faster, without analysis. They can involuntarily laugh at what he is doing, recognize what he is saying about the world and ourselves. This is, in fact, a very child-friendly show and I was happy to see groups of school children wandering around the museum enjoying themselves.

The point of the show is that the most ordinary objects can become astonishing through the process of introspection, re-interpretation and artistic creation. We are invited to see the ordinary in new and richer ways after seeing the show. We are invited to make the ordinary meaningful to our own journeys, to invite the ordinary to become, symbolically, something lavish for us. 

The bizarre images and relationships between images are what happens when creative energy engages with an outside world possessing a humility and magical quality that allows itself to change to meet our spiritual needs to record our development as beings capable of wondrous things such as kindness, concern and mercy.

The show illustrates what Miró called the “magical qualities of the mark.” The images in Miró’s paintings are intermediaries between objective reality and dead ideograms. They stop short of a formal language, because they are alive through our engagement with them, like a biological symbiosis. The images are felt as presences are felt, thus they inspire hope, desire and fear. Indeed, every artist is affected by the world around him and if one is living in a “monstrous” age, engagement with art will elicit the appropriate response to monsters.

Yet, even though Miró lived in Franco’s Spain, a monstrous and threatening world to him, his form of expression was a type that freed his spirit and encouraged others to feel a sense of hope for an inevitable and humane change of circumstances. Miró’s work sustained the human spirit in very dark periods of time, from the Spanish Civil War, through World War II, through Franco’s tyranny. 

This wonderful show of his wonderful work at the Hong Kong Museum of Art shows that Miró’s visual sources may have been simple, but he had a sorcerer’s ability to turn the little recognized or uninteresting in our lives into a golden source of magical engagement.

Plein air paintings: San Francisco/Hong Kong - Interview with Claire Lau

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Claire Lau is an artist known for her plein air paintings who was born in Paris and who has done work in Hong Kong and San Francisco. According to her statement, she “…explores the unique spatial relationship between nature and metropolis…cityscapes on a macro level; banyan trees and succulents on a micro level.”

The cities seem nestled within but autonomous of the surrounding landscapes – carved out of nature and not meaningfully integrated into it. Both Hong Kong and San Francisco are situated near mountains and these are spectacularly rendered by Lau even though the mountains near both cities may have become, in the popular imagination, more picturesque than sublime. Both types of flora (banyan trees and agave plants) once held deep mystical significance for the earlier inhabitants of these respective regions so a conclusion to be drawn might be that the modern city dweller wants the paradoxical situation of proximity to the sacred without the meaningful engagement of the scared. The once-sacred in nature merely catches and pleases the eye of the hurried city-dweller but no longer stimulates the imagination to the extent it once did.

The ability to introspect and examine aspects of our inner reality derived from the mediation of symbols and our earliest symbols came from the natural world. So, to me, Lau’s paintings seem to point to the fact that one thing which has been lost through urbanization is a desire to engage nature on a deeper interpretive level, a level which only comes from a type of integration that allows really seeing and trying to grasp the natural - having a direct and meaningful experience with nature which then throws light on our own humane development.

Why are you so committed to plein air painting?

Plein air painting is a process that forces me to study the world around me with intent, and to build a connection with it. It is a way for me to reflect on questions like ‘Why does this form interest me so much?’, ‘What are the movements that I see and feel here?’, ’How does this all fit together? What are the forces at play?’, and ‘How do I also fit in this space?’. After I’ve painted a scene or a tree, I have built a special connection with it that gets triggered every time I pass by. It’s like how Antoine Saint-Exupéry’s fox taught the little prince about “aprivoiser”. It’s “créer des liens” - to create connections - and that to me is through plein air painting. I find this particularly important today against all trends towards the digital world. I moved from Hong Kong (a place where everyone’s eyes are constantly fixated on a screen, whether it be a hand held device or TV screens on trains and buses), to the world’s tech capital, San Francisco. While I believe that technology has made our lives a lot more convenient and is attempting to solve some important problems, I firmly believe that we must not lose sight of and lose our connection to the world around us. This is everything from the trees, the plants, and the water around us, to the struggling families and homeless people on the streets. It’s about being observant, caring and understanding.

How did you develop an interest in your cityscapes?

When I grew up in Hong Kong, I lived on top of a forested hill. Over the years, I witnessed the forests next to my bus stop being completely removed for highways, the adjacent hill chopped off for skyscrapers, as well as the deteriorating air quality due to the industrialization of Shenzhen. This made me very aware of the relationship between human development and nature. By junior year of high school I made a painting of the chopped off trees next to my bus stop and a very grey painting of the valley called "A Sunny Day in Hong Kong”.

The banyan tree has aerial roots which can point upward while other roots drop to the ground forming new trunks. The banyan tree can therefore be considered ‘upside down’ – roots going upward and trunks/branches downward - as if it were being reflected in a river. So the tree once was a reminder to Buddhists that all is reflection and that even the real or permanent is merely a concept deduced from reflection (a reflection of a reflection). What does it mean to you?

The banyan tree’s forms remind me of life and its cycles, connecting earth and sky with their air roots. They’re a visual embodiment of sustainable systems. They flow, roots like rivers and air roots like arteries; they stretch, they lean, and they dance; they show strength, show support, and are grounded.

A lot of the plants you highlight in your SF paintings are agave plants. Did you do research into this plant and its use before the urbanization of that area of the US? 

I did not do in-depth research into the agave’s use before the urbanization of the US, but I did know that it was used for medicinal purposes, consumption, and daily use. I grew up with my mom cooking me aloe vera soup when I was sick, and using its skin to treat burns. I chose it because I found it fascinating that such a majestic and purposeful plant would be growing around the city like a weed. Formally, they demand attention through their layers unfurling from their core (like a rose), yet with their rigid strength and spikes they recall resilience, especially during California’s historic drought. As with other succulents, they remind me of the beauty and adaptiveness of nature, of how wondrous life forms will continue to exist even after human beings make this planet uninhabitable for their own species.

What have been some of your influences?

I'm influenced a lot by my physical environment, the spaces, the plants, the light and colors. In terms of artists, compositionally I've been very interested at how David Hockney and Rackstraw Downes explore space - the compilations of multiple fields of vision as your eyes move, creating an experience of a space much more fluid than the Renaissance theories of perspective. Nowadays people call it "fish-eye", because they are all conditioned by cameras. But how do we describe the full experience of being in a space?

Artists you admire?

Other artists that I admire include Wayne Thiebaud and Sébastien Mahon (color, exaggerated space, giving personality / energy to landscapes), Sangram Majumdar and Suzanna Coffey (for color, touch, composition, visual abstraction). I also can't deny that having spent my childhood in the Musée d'Orsay and Pompidou, I had always admired Cézanne. Even though I only really came to the conclusion that plein air painting was for me in my final year of college, after experimenting with many different ways of painting, I think my childhood in France affected me tremendously.

Chow Chun Fei, from HK, recently had an opening at Klein Sun Gallery in NY City (one of the best galleries to see contemporary Chinese work in the US).  There are actually a few galleries devoted to mainland Chinese art in NY and this seems to be meeting a growing market in the US. Are HK artists a part of this trend or do you folks see yourselves separate from this new wave of mainlanders?

When I was in high school and was asked what I wanted to study in university, my classmate (herself going into art) was extremely surprised by my answer and exclaimed “But your grades are so good, shouldn’t you be studying something other than art?”

In Hong Kong, I think there is still very little respect for fine art as a career, and thus less resources put into nurturing local artists. The situation is slowly improving, but even projects like the new West Kowloon Cultural Centre so far mostly benefit real estate developers, tycoons, politicians and those in the top of the art market rather than any local emerging artists. With the insurmountable cost of living in HK, it’s often difficult to survive as an artist. Consequently there are fewer artists that can rise to attention internationally. I think as there is a greater ‘thirst’ for Asian art in the US, Hong Kong will start to benefit from this trend, but I don’t think it will produce the same number of artists per capita.

When you are not painting, what do you like to do? Books you like? Movies? Music?

I am a singer, used to be a composer and have done a lot of a cappella arrangements for groups that I've led. For the past year I've been extremely busy being a political organizer and volunteer for the Bernie Sanders primary campaign, and I'm currently the co-founder and co-Chair of a progressive political group in San Francisco. I'm also part of a political club for Hong Kongers in the Bay Area. I'm currently writing a graphic memoir on my participation in the Umbrella Movement and my grandma's escape from China to Hong Kong in the late 50s.

I think everyone should read ‘Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed’ by Jarred Diamond, and watch Miyazaki's films, especially ‘Mononoke Hime’ and ‘Nausicaa'.

Claire Lau can be contacted through her website: http://www.clairelau.net/