In his enamel paintings of movie frames, Chow Chun-fai transfers onto canvas memorable scenes from celluloid classics such as Infernal Affairs and Love in a Fallen City. His recreations are so faithful that they include the films' English and Chinese subtitles. But the images are not just slavish imitations. The 28-year-old says his movie paintings series probes sociopolitical issues such as identity, the definition and role of art and public space in Hong Kong. To delve into that subtext is not as simple as it looks. 'It's actually more difficult, yet more interesting, not to alter the image and the subtitles,' he says, adding that it would be much easier to create an impression by manipulatively matching images to text out of context. 'We can easily imagine the impact of juxtaposing an image of [Chief Executive] Donald Tsang [Yam-kuen] giving a speech next to a quote taken from [TV drama] Heart of Greed, can't we? 'I'm not making changes to the originals, so I'm not rewriting history. I just uncover what's there.' Chow thinks art should function as a reflection of society. 'Art records the culture of a certain place at a certain time - not only the life of the artist.' It's this conceptual approach that has won Chow much critical acclaim, making him one of the most sought after Hong Kong artists working today. The mild mannered fine arts graduate has just won this year's Sovereign Asian Art Prize and the Hong Kong Arts Centre 30th Anniversary Award Grand Prize for his works Once a Thief, 'Any Self-respecting Thief would be Proud to Steal this Painting' and Shaolin Soccer, 'If We Don't Have Any Dream in Life' respectively. He will be among 18 artists from greater China to appear in Hanart TZ Gallery's group exhibition Hong Kong, Hong Kong, which opens next Tuesday. On display will be his painting of a Wan Chai street scene from the 1990 movie Front Page, which shows an old pawn shop that has long since disappeared. The painter remains unmoved by his success. 'Yes, this movie paintings series is selling well, but I've also made works not meant to be sold,' says Chow, who has spent the past three years creating large-scale photo collages that combine self-portraits, Chinese folk tales and scenes from canonical western paintings such as Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper and Michelangelo's Creation of Adam. The pieces set out to reinterpret what we deem classics. His works from both series have now been shown in museums and galleries worldwide. Earlier this year, Chow was the youngest among the seven artists contributing works to Made in Hong Kong, a group show held at the Hong Kong Museum of Art that explored the city's cultural identity. Chow attributes the Hong Kong sensibility of his works to his working-class background. 'My dad was a taxi driver,' he says. 'I got to know the world of taxi drivers very well, which in a way has influenced my art.' In 2001, when Chow was studying for his bachelor's degree in fine arts at the Chinese University, he struggled to pay off the finance for two taxis after his father suffered a stroke. Taxis became part of the artist's life and featured in many of his early paintings, forming his first series branded 'local'. 'I didn't mean to put in local elements,' he says. 'I didn't think those red taxis were telling local stories at all ... I just wanted to experiment with media forms, so I painted what I had photographed,' Chow says. 'Taxis were in my paintings simply because they were in my everyday snapshots.' Born and bred in Hong Kong, Chow is careful about how to portray his home city. Put off by art marked by an exotic sense of Chineseness, he has always avoided any stereotypical vocabulary. 'But later I found it challenging not to fall into the trap of cliche, and not to represent Hong Kong through images of sailing boats and Victoria Harbour.' To gain new perspectives and a more detached observation of his home city, Chow rented a studio in Beijing with fellow local artist Lam Tung-pang last year, while seeking chances to travel abroad at the same time (he came back from a two-month residency in Italy three weeks ago). The artist says he is spending about one-third of his time in Hong Kong. That flexible - if not exactly nomadic - way of life has always appealed to Chow. 'I've been longing to launch a creative career,' he says. 'But I just had a basic idea about what kind of lifestyle I wanted. The nine-to-five routine is not for me.' Chow, who wanted to work in illustration or the theatre as a teenager, graduated from the Chinese University in 2003 and completed a master's degree in fine arts in 2006. It was at university that his aspiration of becoming a visual artist grew concrete. 'Before that, I wondered if studying fine arts would make me nihilistic and idealistic, but it was the opposite. The programme showed me what the possibilities were if I wanted to become an artist.' Now represented by Hanart TZ Gallery, Chow is successful both critically and commercially - one of his paintings went under the hammer for HK$280,000 at a charity auction last year. But he's far from commercially minded. 'I don't sell every work of mine. I even want to keep some of them out of sight,' he says with a smile. 'What I've wanted is simple - to sustain myself and my family through continual creation.' That humble approach understates his ambition to be a full-time artist in his hometown. 'I hope art as a professional practice will be thoroughly realised in Hong Kong one day.' Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Dec 2-31, Hanart TZ Gallery, 202 Henley Building, 5 Queen's Rd Central. Mon-Fri, 10am to 6.30pm; Sat, 10am to 6pm. Inquiries: 2526 9019
