Life comes full circle for art's grand dame

IT was impossible not to like Irene Chou Luyun from the instant she answered the door wearing stripy red and black socks. This 74-year-old grand dame of Hong Kong art is shy, friendly and unassuming. Her work is the only daunting thing about her - and has been ever since she burst on to the local art scene in 1968 with a solo show at City Hall, a 44-year-old housewife and mother with no previous exhibitions. Even then, this pupil of Lui Shou-kwan - one of Hong Kong's prominent art figures of the early 1960s, influenced by a mixture of abstract expressionism and chinese tradition - was said to show an inner strength in her paintings: a searching for the universal by looking inside. This month Hongkong Land hosts the first large show in Hong Kong of the work Chou has done since emigrating to Brisbane nearly eight years ago, to live near her son. The work is different, more complex - not only has her searching involved the questions of identity that come from leaving a place that has been home for 40 years, but also, when she left she was in a wheelchair, uncertain she would ever be able to paint again. Chou makes an unlikely stroke victim: she seems too full of energy to need the Zimmer frame propped against her television. 'Yes,' she agreed happily, demonstrating what she called her 'baby walk'. 'I'm the real slow-coach of a group. And look . . . a disability badge. I can park anywhere, so lucky.' She had the stroke after a short period of intensive lunching and dining with her students, she said. 'I was so exhausted: it's stupid to be too busy.' Her description of the two days lying on her bathroom floor was surprisingly funny, un-self-pitying yet strangely surreal, full of details of animated objects moving seemingly of their own accord to reflect her own physical distress. 'I noticed an orange and a papaya on the table and they fell down so I picked them up, and then they dropped on the floor again and so did I. 'I felt a force, a very tender force, not painful at all,' she said, touching the side of her neck to show where she was touched. 'But it was pushing me to the floor.' Then the radio also dropped to the floor, 'I thought that's not bad: I'll use it as a pillow.' On the third day, a Saturday, she woke up, and remembered she had an appointment to meet some friends. 'I couldn't just leave these two ladies sitting in the restaurant and waiting for me, so I crawled to the telephone. That's the point - if you want something enough then it can happen. I don't think I could have moved before, because I didn't want it enough.' She had not been afraid, or in pain: the two things that worried her were that her son's family 'might face having an old disabled woman living in their house', and she was also beginning to realise she might never paint again. 'And I thought, well, if I can't paint again what will I do? And I thought, I know, I will write a book of Chinese recipes.' That book has not yet been written. 'I have been amazed at how much time I have found to paint,' she said. That the stroke was in the right hemisphere of her brain is a mixed blessing; she is right-handed, and that hand is unaffected. However, the right hemisphere is generally believed to be the creative one, and Chou was as anxious as everyone else to see if there was any creative impairment. There is one important change in her work, she said, explaining that one of her favourite sayings was a quote by British poet A E Housman: 'He said that 'when I love, I concentrate my life on you, and make you not die'.' 'I think that is the idea I always want to express in my painting.' In her pre-Australian work, she was experimenting with using spherical shapes all over her paintings to express the sense of loving someone so much you believe you can save them, make them whole, through the power of your own thought. 'I called them 'concentration': I think I could also have called them love.' Strangely, after the stroke, there are still circles over her work: still in bright colours like red or turquoise, but they are flat discs, clearly two dimensional. It is as if before her stroke she was defining spiritual wholeness by creating images of solidness; now she has realised that a flattened sphere, spread to infinite thinness, can stretch out to touch the edges of the universe and beyond. Her painting is like meditation, she said, adding she still does more conventional meditation and exercise 'although I lost my balance - my tai chi is wobbly'. The paintings are full of calligraphic motifs, and obsessive spirals. The lines are, for her, 'the moment, the power, strength, the essence of life. It is the chi - the breath'. Chou did not plan to be an artist. When she was a 21-year-old graduate in post-war Shanghai, she decided she wanted to write. After working briefly for a news agency, she became a reporter and features writer on the Peace Daily. She married her chief editor, and quickly decided on a career change. 'Suddenly I wanted to be a wife, a mother: everyone goes through times when they want to do something completely different.' Chou was the first child of an unhappy marriage; her father took a concubine and her mother became bitter and lonely, dying at 50, 'before her hair turned grey'. From this you can perhaps see how, in her own marriage, she wanted to make any sacrifice to make it work. Their decision to leave Shanghai in 1949 was less than certain. 'Everyone we knew was packing up and leaving: I'm not sure we'd have done the same, but I was pregnant and I thought what if I'm in hospital delivering my baby and then the civil war suddenly arrives outside the window: I'd be helpless.' Newspapermen were poorly paid in Hong Kong in those days: after writing articles and short stories for a pittance, her husband soon found that film scripts were the easiest way of looking after a young family that had, by then, grown to three children. The scripts were usually for bedroom comedy films which were all the rage in the 1950s, she said: 'Not naughty ones, but the kind of films that if it was Hollywood you would find Doris Day and Rock Hudson in.' By the time she was 30, and her children were going to school, Chou became interested in art. She began to explore the library resources of the British Council and American Consulate, reading books like Herbert Read's The Meaning Of Art, with the book in one hand, a dictionary in the other. 'At the beginning I didn't have any training. I had to fill myself up, because I was an empty student. It was the time of abstract expressionism: there were artists like Jackson Pollock doing wonderful, crazy, things. I found that art wasn't just painting or making things: art was life. Drinking water is art. Art is everything.' The Universe Lies Within, the Rotunda, One Exchange Square, until October 11