LATE one night, a few months ago, British artist Louise Soloway was startled from her painting reverie by two fierce-looking men in dusty overalls, covered in tattoos, who knocked on the door of her studio. 'Can you design me a new tattoo?' one asked, holding out a Japanese comic book filled with fighter figures? 'I want something like this one,' he said, pointing to one of the baddies who was swathed in studs and weaponry. 'But with the head turned like this.' Such individual commissions have become par for the course for the 33-year-old British artist who was originally commissioned to do a bas-relief of the construction at the new airport at Chek Lap Kok, but who has also found herself designing T-shirts for the Rugby Sevens outing . . . and looking at tattoos, as well as suction head air pipes, in a completely new way.
She first came to Hong Kong a year ago - for a week - to promote an exhibition at Gallery 7, in Glenealy: 'I'd worked with Gallery 7 while I was studying art in India, and six years later I got a phone call and a faint voice asked me if I remembered them, and if I wanted to show my work in Hong Kong. Of course I said yes.' So, on one of the first nights here, she found herself in Joe Bananas in Wan Chai at 3am.
'I imagined they'd all be bankers, but in came a crowd of Dutch guys from the dredgers,' she said. 'I talked to one of them: he said he worked on a dredger, and I asked: 'What's that?' Although I sort of knew. And then he said he was working on the new airport, and I asked: 'What new airport?' So he invited me to go over and have a look.' It was the marine workshop that really grabbed her attention. The huge machines resemble dinosaur fossils - huge, powerful, with great spokes and rusted spirals. And all the workers in orange overalls made the scene seem as if it were from a bizarre science fiction movie.
'I was absolutely bowled over,' she said.
She was also struck by the enthusiasm that the contractors and employees had for their work. 'In the beginning I thought this guy was being quite boring about his dredging work, but then I got caught up in how interesting the whole process was,' Soloway said.
She fell in love with the energy she saw in Hong Kong, went back to England to pack her things, rent out her studio, and came back here as British Council artist-in-residence - while still making regular visits with her sketch pad to Chek Lap Kok.
Some sketches caught the attention of Jaap de Ruyter, the Airport Platform Contractors Joint Venture project director, who commissioned her to do a large bas-relief of the platform construction process - which she would first make out of clay, and then produce a silicone rubber mould for hand-painted fibreglass reproductions, from a small studio in one of the accommodation blocks.
