Patches of vivid blue sky can be seen amid the branches and vibrant blooms of the persimmon tree. The red, yellow, orange and white colours represent the tree during the four seasons, and they remind artist Liu Tung-mui of outings in the countryside surrounding Beijing.
"I always asked my parents to take me out and in the countryside there were lots of these trees, so throughout the seasons my parents took me to see them," says Liu, as we chat with her father in their Wan Chai flat. Her mother died some years ago. "I like to be outside and derive inspiration from my surroundings."
She laughs, recalling how she loved to watch the snow fall in a Beijing winter, and would persuade her parents to take her out. While they froze, she stored images in her head of birds clustered in the trees - "I saw the family together" - and the flakes of falling snow. These became a series of paintings that she shows on a table in the living room.
Liu was starved of oxygen when she was born in the capital in 1974 and she suffered cerebral palsy. Her father Liu Pok-hing, a video cameraman, was based there.
Liu sits in a wheelchair and the muscular degeneration caused by the palsy makes her speech difficult and her head movement at times difficult to control. Her father translates for her. (Janet Tam, executive director of the Arts with the Disabled Association Hong Kong, translated this interview.)
