Osage Soho Tomorrow to Apr 26
In his latest exhibition, Wilson Shieh Ka-ho dresses up one of Hong Kong cinema's coolest icons - Chow Yun-fat. With his extra-fine Chinese paintbrushes, the artist has recreated a wardrobe of costumes worn by the star.
'Clothing is probably the most accessible design product in our lives. I know nothing about fashion, but I paint clothes in the traditional Chinese gongbi style a lot,' says Shieh. 'You can always tell the stories of the subject matter from a good portrait. The way one dresses can offer a lot of information on his or her identity, life and characteristics.'
Chow Yun-fat's Fitting Room, Shieh's second solo show at Osage, includes more than 20 paintings featuring characters (above) played by the actor in six big- and small-screen classics, including 1980s TV drama The Bund, Anna and the King (1999), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2003) and Curse of the Golden Flower (2006).
Six works are large acrylic paintings of costumes with illustrations of film scenes in coloured pencils on paper. To capture the detail of the costumes, Shieh spent hours watching Chow's films. 'Gongbi style emphasises on the accurate details so the colours, textures and structures of different kinds of garments - and even the pattern of the buttons on them - are of great importance for in a gongbi painting.' says Shieh.
The costumes he picked include suits, old-style Chinese garb, the attire of Thai royalty and motor-racing sportswear. Of all the costumes he painted, Shieh says he found the heavily detailed golden armour from Curse of the Golden Flower the most difficult to recreate.