Cheung Yee, modern art pioneer in early years retrospective in Hong Kong
- Cheung first exhibited in Hong Kong in 1964 and taught art at two Hong Kong universities
- His sculptures evoke a kind of primordial, shamanistic energy and are on show at Galerie du Monde
The explosive growth of the city’s contemporary art market over the past decade or so has led to growing interest in its own art history, especially the generation of modern art pioneers who became active in Hong Kong in the 1960s.
The latest is a new retrospective of Cheung Yee’s works at Galerie du Monde. The influential and prolific artist had his first solo exhibition in 1964 and taught for two decades at what was then the Hong Kong Polytechnic and later, the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s department of fine arts.
You have probably seen his Crab General No. 1 (1984): a strutting, long-limbed crustacean made of bronze installed as public art behind the Hong Kong Science Museum in 1990, a cross between Louise Bourgeois’ spiders and the robots in Hayao Miyazaki’s Laputa.
Cheung, now 83, is best known for his sculptures but he studied classical Chinese painting and seal carving at the fine arts department of Taiwan Normal University, a teachers’ training college, after graduating from a pro-Kuomintang secondary school in Hong Kong.