A DECADE ago artist Hu Yongkai was responsible for deciding on the features of the super-heroes starring in the Shanghai Animation Film Studio cartoons.
Today his heroes are ordinary people - women mainly, whose heroism consists of living with their own melancholy and coping with their day-to-day struggles.
The subjects of Hu's early paintings, slim peasant women with babies or cats, chatting to each other, sitting pensively or just getting on with their work, have been largely superseded in the past two years by plumper nudes or elegant American Chinese women who have been his models.
But the faces that have become his hallmark are almost the same: smooth, almost expressionless, with an explicit debt to Modigliani. 'Although I moved to the US last year, the theme of my paintings has not changed: the subject matter is still as Chinese as it ever was,' said Hu, 47, whose brightly coloured mixed media works on Korean rice paper can be found in museums and drawing rooms from Copenhagen to Australia.
He said the newer paintings were 'richer, perhaps happier' but admitted that the melancholy of his early struggles for recognition had largely been replaced by a haunting sense of homesickness - first for China and now for Hong Kong, where he wants to spend more time.
'It is strange: I have been more compassionate since I left China. I no longer just think of what would make a pretty picture: my new paintings have more feeling behind them.' 'Before, I felt restricted. In China you need the government's consent to exhibit anything.' Hu reflected for a moment: 'I don't think they would have banned the work I am doing now, but just knowing they cannot makes me freer to explore my own feelings.' He has plenty of time to explore: although his wife and his 18-year-old student son are nearly fluent in the language of their adopted country, his own English is still sketchy and his social life limited.