Fong So, greying and frail at 52, is perhaps the only man in Hong Kong who looks back at the time of Sars as a 'luxury'. From the end of March to late May, he locked himself in his rented apartment in Sai Ying Pun and painted. His scenes from the epidemic are not the images one might expect - heroic doctors and nurses, Amoy Gardens or dying victims. Instead, Fong's chronicle of the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome is majestic, spectral, suggestive and entirely mundane. Fong's heroes - as they have been all through his career - are the ordinary folk of Hong Kong, stoic, battered and resilient.
In the first painting of the series, 'The Shock', an elderly man sits on a park bench reading a newspaper, his flap-eared dog at his feet. The powerful brush strokes that define the reader's shoulders are familiar to any student of Chinese painting; it is the outline of a sage in repose, or the craggy shoulders of a lofty mountain peak. Closely scrutinising the outspread page, with its news of the Sars outbreak, the old man's posture suggests strength rather than fear or fragility.
Using soft, heavy paper, ink and the mineral-based palette of Chinese tradition - as well as its brush technique and approach to line and volume - Fong's work is yet entirely contemporary, urban, and gritty. In feeling and tone, the Sars series is more reminiscent of the beggars and prostitutes of Picasso's blue period than the typical Chinese repertoire of scenes from nature.
The Hong Kong he portrays is not one of luxury cars and harbour views but of the shabby older quarters of the city. They are also mostly of people. 'I have strong feelings about people, rather than birds or flowers or landscapes,' Fong says. Entirely uncharacteristic of his work is his homage to the medical workers who died of Sars, a graceful cluster of Calla lilies.
Ranging in scale from large to wall-sized, most of Fong's paintings tell a story, as with 'The Shock'. Unemployed men wait in line at the Jockey Club to apply for jobs in one picture; a couple shakes joss sticks in hope of relief from the epidemic in another. Fong's perspective is both journalistic and political, habits of the profession in which he spent most of his working life. From 1981 to 1998, he was a managing editor of the magazine initially called The Seventies and, at the time of its closing, The Nineties Monthly. Known for its critical coverage of the mainland, during its heyday it was among the most respected publications on Chinese affairs internationally.
The real question is not how Fong came by his politics or subject matter, but how he became a painter at all. In the answer lies both Fong's greatness as an artist and a lesson about the versatility and unpredictability of Chinese civilisation, continuing from ancient times to the present.
During the lean years of the Great Leap Forward, Fong was living in Guangzhou. With no place else to go, his father would leave him at the Guangzhou Fine Art Museum. There the child began to draw. The little boy attracted the attention of a collector, who introduced young Fong to Chao Shaoan, one of the leaders of the Guangzhou-based Lingnan school of painting.