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. 'The dragon ornaments are very complicated and delicately decorated,' he says. 'Not all the screen shots in the film give you a comprehensive look at the costume, so I had to watch the film over and over again.' For the show, Shieh used acrylics, crayon, graphite and collages of prints on canvas rather than his signature Chinese ink and colour on silk. Since his graduation with a master's degree in fine arts from the Chinese University in 2000, he has focused on the gongbi tradition and hasn't used other techniques for more than a decade. 'One big transformation [today] is that sizes are different. I paint in larger scale on canvas. Also, acrylic colours are much sharper and stronger than watercolours, and there's a larger palette to choose from,' he says. 'But I have inherited the same approach - even the tools I use to paint in gongbi style - for this project.' It's also unusual for the artist to finish a project in only three months. 'It's a new challenge for me, efficiency-wise. Because gongbi painting requires a lot of patience, you can't rush for perfection. Yet this time, with only three months, I am happy with the result.' 45 Caine Road, Central, Inquiries: 2537 0688
