Why 20th century Hong Kong artist Luis Chan is so popular in China
- Chan, who has an exhibition running in Shanghai, was born in Panama and moved to Hong Kong in 1910 aged five
- His life and works spanned the 20th century and are a reflection of the evolution of Hong Kong and Shanghai
Last month, a major exhibition featuring more than 100 of the late Luis Chan Fook-sin’s works opened at the Power Station of Art museum in Shanghai, an expanded version of a major survey of his work shown in the city in 2012 and of another retrospective at the Zhi Art Museum in Chengdu, western China, last year.
That the work of Chan, a Hong Kong visual artist, is popular in China is unusual, since the former British colony usually occupies the margins of the country’s mainstream cultural narrative. Many people in China still think of Hong Kong as a cultural desert – an inaccurate 20th century label that’s stuck – and the city’s still recent union with the country makes its own art history a disparate appendage to the broader China story.
After all, late 20th century Hong Kong artists lived in a totally different world from their peers to the north; the party-loving Chan, who worked as an artist while China was still in the grips of the devastating Cultural Revolution, exemplified that.
The self-taught artist had no training in traditional Chinese ink painting or calligraphy. Born in Panama, his family moved to Hong Kong in 1910 when he was five.
