Photographs don't do justice to Callum Innes' paintings. You look at website reproductions of those blocks of colour, those apparently blank spaces; you read the glowing critical appraisals - 'pure walls of shifting light and colour', 'haikus on the theme of colour', 'pared-down glimmers of colour' - and you wonder, not for the first time, if the British contemporary art world is having a little joke at the expense of the rest of us.
It's true Innes is British - well, Scottish. It's true he's contemporary (he was born in 1962). But he's about as removed from the hoopla of Britart as Maria Callas is from Lady Gaga. He applies watercolours to paper and oil to canvas; these days, that sort of traditional approach is a novelty. To spend time with the end result, in a quiet space in the heart of this city, is an unexpected pleasure.
Innes, on his first visit to Hong Kong, is wry, self-deprecating, passionate and slightly jetlagged. One of his bugbears, he says, is people going to exhibitions and being fed information about the work but not actually looking at it.
'The beautiful experience - I'm not talking about my work - is going in and discovering it,' he says. So the show has no name, and all 15 works are listed as Untitled.
Nevertheless, it's probably useful to point out that what you see is more complicated than it first appears. Innes' works are as much about subtraction as addition: he starts off by painting a canvas in one colour, then removing some of the initial coat in a particular area with turpentine. Then he does it again. And again. And again. He calls the process 'unpainting'.
You have to look at the raw, layered edges of these calm works to guess at the tension and commitment that went into their creation. Only then will you realise that a canvas initially painted entirely black - in the case of Untitled No82 - has ended up as two blocks of red and white. His work combines the visual with the physical; if you examine the orange pastel at the entrance to the show you'll see the shape of his hand as it crushed the colour onto the handmade paper. As Edouard Malingue, whose Central gallery is putting on the artist's first show in Asia, remarks: 'It sounds strange to say but you have the impression his work is almost sculpture.'
Innes wasn't always an abstract painter. He'd studied at Gray's School of Art in Aberdeen and then at Edinburgh College of Art before becoming a figurative artist. 'The work was full of mythologies and fantasies, the things that go through your head at 21,' he says ruefully. 'They were falsehoods.'