It is 10pm on a Saturday night, and the narrow Meli Melo Living Arts Cafe on Wellington Street is packed with people ready to jam. To art jam, that is; to party with paint. Twenty-plus easels are lined up an elbow's width apart, adorned with huge blank canvases waiting for nervous artists to start splattering the acrylics. It's almost impossible not to squirt paint Jackson Pollock-style over your neighbours' shoes thanks to the caked-up nozzles on the paint pumps. Inspiring chill-out lounge music from Europe, the Middle East and Asia fills the studio, and the five-metre high ceilings of the skinny 1929 building in Central allow ample room for the creative spirit to soar ... but first a glass of wine. The hardest part is getting started. Too hard, I decide, and wander off to talk to braver, got-it-together souls - most of them novice artists - who have taken the plunge and jumped head, hand and heart first into creating something from nothing.
Businesswoman and 'first time ever in my life' painter Yan Shao, 34, is feverishly scrubbing away at a huge, swirling cream and chocolate-coloured eye. She's one of a group of nine, mostly in banking and finance, who have been before. A friend with blue paint-splattered hands nonchalantly smokes while watching Shao work. 'I didn't know what I was doing so it's come out quite well, it's really quite nice,' Shao says, breathless with effort. Hours later Shao is plastering over her boyfriend's more tentative, scratchy efforts with bold diagonal slashes of vermilion and blue. He watches her with unfettered admiration.
In contrasting style, Shanghai-based Jane Chao Sin-ho stares at herself in the mirror above her canvas, searching for a clue, before she moves to execute the next meticulous stroke in her haunting, Fauvist-style self-portrait. The 26-year old studied fine arts at school but admits it has taken her some time to stop being intimidated by the huge canvas.
Then there is the slightly annoying architect who wanders around offering more suggestions than are strictly welcome; the solemn Frenchman who crosses his arms and stares and stares at his monochromatic, moody double moonscape; and the bouncy advertising guy who paints a blue background over and over again because his friends sabotage it each time he stocks up on paint. 'I just came here to paint a tree,' he wails.
A succession of visitors pops in from the street, giving the evening a party-in-the-kitchen feeling as the crowd gathers against a stainless-steel trough where the artists clean their brushes. In the past 20 months, more than 2,000 people have joined the party, creating a community of artists of varying training, talent, background and skill. There have been other 'art jams' held in other cities, but none quite like this. One of the key differences, in true Hong Kong style, is that this is a business: first-timers jam on Saturday nights, members (anyone can join the club for $250 a year; sessions cost $500, or $400 for members) during the week. Art jams elsewhere tend to be one-off, artists-only events, or aimed at children.
So what's the attraction? Meli Melo co-founder Betty Cheung Yue-wan, 37, explains: 'We have many people saying, 'My painting was terrible but my mother liked it.' They come back again because they liked doing it. The value is not in the painting, it's in the sense of release or freedom. For the first hour and a half they don't know each other, but at one point something breaks and one of them speaks to the person next to them and suddenly they sound like the best of friends. It's a wonderful, bizarre and mysterious phenomenon. And what's interesting is when they lose the fear of trying, all these honest things come out of them,' she says.
