Hong Kong through artists' eyes: a different city guidebook
Book features artists using mediums including painting and photography to interpret both rural and urban scenes, and carries a map of scenes that have inspired art over the years, writes Kylie Knott
(HK$590), launched this month, is brimming with text, images and anecdotes that tell the story of the city we call home through the eyes of artists, many of them local. Their works interpret themes such as heritage, language and identity, offering a glimpse of the city that travellers may not otherwise be afforded. The book includes a city map pointing to spots that have inspired the artists.
Artists featured include Au Yeung Nai-chim, whose paintings are of everyday life from the 1950s to the present, and Parisian Romain Jacquet-Lagrèze, a photographer who has managed to do justice to Hong Kong's tightly packed, vertigo-inducing urban landscapes.
Evan Wu Siu-ping's work celebrates the beauty of ordinary life in small villages while the crowded streets of Central and Causeway Bay have been twisted into bold new shapes by the paintbrush of Korean-American Jin Meyerson. Other artists featured include Charles Munka, Enoch Cheung, Lok Ming Fung, Tsang Kin-wah and Ho Sin-tung.
The book, created in association with Production Q and MobArt, is the first in a series that aims to cover Paris, London and Singapore, among other hip and happening cities. It is also the inspiration for an exhibition, "The City Book", at the Clipper Lounge of the Mandarin Oriental in Central until February 3.
