HON Chi-fun likes his paintings to speak for themselves. But because he's been painting for half a century, inevitably he has a lot to say. So he'll willingly tell you his philosophies but will insist 'my paintings are not about anything, except myself'. The twists and turns of his mind, the ups and downs of his heart, the excitement of discovering light through darkness are all captured in a retrospective on one of Hong Kong's most influential contemporary artists that has just opened at Alisan Fine Arts.
Hon, looking frail at 78 and sounding far from it, insists: 'I've always tried not to express myself, but to deliver - what I've been and how, and what I've been longing for. Even if I'm extremely joyful, I don't express it. I treasure those feelings. I try to show them in my paintings. What I don't have is a feeling of a mission, but now I can say anything. I'm old so why not?' He can be gleeful about that and sad within a moment. He rails against being old physically and revels in the scope it's given him mentally and creatively.
Hon's has been a full life, full of travel and, because this is China, full of hardship. So the words just flow, and if he is astonishingly introspective, a good deal of his wisdom incorporates an impatience with insincerity and cliche and a vigorous pursuit of truth. He has a lot to paint about, in other words, and it expresses itself in increasingly abstract, free, powerful, almost aggressive works. He's a long way from the beautiful, rather impressionist landscapes he began his career with, a long way from his roots.
In the closing years of the 1920s he and his younger brothers were growing up like other poor kids in Hong Kong. His home and his schooling was, he said, completely traditional. 'We even kowtowed to our parents - yes, down on the ground.' One day, his father, a taxi driver who could not write, unexpectedly gave him a set of books about painting. 'My father must have noticed my burning desire to get started in painting and my perplexity as to how to begin.' In 1941, when the Japanese invaded Hong Kong, Hon's parents fled with the family to the mainland. It took a decade for them to return and when they did, Hon, looking for meaning after the uprooted years, took a Post Office job where he could work regular hours and concentrate on painting in a time of great cultural upheaval. He made artist friends and read widely about painting. He couldn't find a teacher but eventually he found a painting companion, sketching often with friend Luis Chan.
His first solo show, in 1962, a year after his father died, was a turning point, but you wouldn't have known it at the time. He began a journey of exploration of creativity and his pictures are a documentation of that, and of a literal journey that began in 1968 and has continued pretty much steadily until his recent illness. All that time he seems to have been working hard to keep a jolly character and a tendency to laugh a lot at bay. Along the way he's been mugged in Rome, taken tiny boats up Norwegian fjords, been a hippy in India, gone to South America where he jumped into the spectacular Iguazu Falls and nearly drowned, but where he found inspiration for the series on which he is currently working.
In 1992, he gave into fears about the return of Hong Kong to China and fled for the second time, to Canada. 'I never dreamed I'd have to run away for the second time but in Hong Kong you could never envisage what would happen the next day.
