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Magically real world

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The Heart of the City, Works by Luis Chan and Mak Yee-fun; Hanart TZ Gallery until December 11.

LUIS Chan is 89 and Mak Yee-fun is 44 years his junior. Both have cause to celebrate their achievement in art.

Luis Chan is a painter hard to pigeon-hole. His mature painting has been described as ''magic realism'', or as having elements of James Ensor (when I suggested this to Chan some years ago, he had never heard of the Belgian painter).

Certainly his world is one of the imagination in which people and their everyday environment are liberated from the constraints of gravity that ties down the world.

They and the land can take off, can inhabit another element.

A giant fish, whose body is partly formed by human faces, sails like some dirigible well above the horizon with an air of quiet content in a painting of such assurance that you accept it as reality.

In another, the pyramidal group of people are clothed (as Chan's people mostly are) in soft greens and purples and brown, and is named The Visitor.

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