Slow art master’s old-school Hong Kong paintings find a growing audience, and new show is worth the wait
Yeung Tong-lung, 60, switched to figurative painting so his daughter could understand his work. His oil paintings of Hong Kong life, big and with a striking freshness, humour and directness, are at last being recognised
There’s a building in Kennedy Town with a sufficiently odd address that it doesn’t register on Google maps. The entrance is so narrow you’d walk past it in a second, on your way to more gentrified locations. The steep white stairs are studded with black bin bags. Not so long ago this was subdivided-flat territory and it retains a transient air; but it’s where Yeung Tong-lung, who came to Kennedy Town in the early 1990s, has had a studio for many years.
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He’s been painting for even longer, ever since his teens in Fujian when he was obliged to create Cultural Revolution propaganda. If you’re a Hong Kong art connoisseur (or historian), you’ll know his name. He arrived here in 1973. He was a co-founder of the Quart Society, the city’s first artist-run cooperative, which reigned on Coronation Terrace between 1990 and 1992. It was ahead of its time. Only later did the city begin cultivating its image as an art hub, and by then a different generation – both locally and internationally – had begun to find figurative painting hopelessly quaint.
But still Yeung, 60, paints his oils on canvas. He doesn’t have a gallery and recent shows have tended to be sporadic. As he can’t earn a living solely from art, he’s often created backdrops for film studios, photographers, commercial premises.
When he did the murals in Michelle Garnaut’s former restaurant M at the Fringe, which opened in 1989 at the Fringe Club, he was hired by the designer, Paola Dindo. But the location was already familiar from his other life: in those days, Hong Kong artists used to paint on the Fringe Club’s roof.
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Through the sculptor Lee Man Sang, he met another designer, Debra Little in the 1990s. She began bringing people to his studio and in 2011 and 2014, she organised small solo shows in DeeM, her (now closed) design shop at the end of Hollywood Road.