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Indian artist Riya Chandiramani, pictured with her artwork in her studio in Hong Kong’s Central district, is one of several artists in the city from India who are having an impact on the local arts scene. Photo: Jonathan Wong

Indian artists who hit their stride in Hong Kong: ‘I had the chance to turn into a butterfly’

  • A number of Hong Kong-based artists with Indian origins are having an impact on the city’s art scene, from public art to art-styled fashion
  • The first Indian wall mural festival was held in the city in January, organised by a local retailer that promotes India’s traditional art forms
Art

When she’s not painting walls, Riya Chandiramani says she’s breaking them down. An artist born and raised in Hong Kong to Indian immigrant parents, and an advocate for gender equality and women’s empowerment, Chandiramani, 26, says her art challenges restrictive ideas that define how women “should” be.

She is now working on her first solo series called Cereal Box, a commentary on consumerism, nourishment and the female body.

“It draws inspiration from Indo-Persian miniature paintings, Chinese Mao-era propaganda posters and commercial branding of consumer products,” she says. “The series is about how in our capitalist society we are taught there isn’t enough, and that we are not enough in our most natural, truest state. We have to consume to fill these voids. We have to buy into brands that will give us everything we could possibly need.”

Chandiramani is one of a number of Hong Kong artists with Indian origins who are having an impact on the city’s art scene – from public art to art-styled fashion – but she hasn’t always questioned social mores.

A home mural by Chandiramani. Photo: Riya Chandiramani

Growing up, she preferred to conform, she says, and in her senior year of college she struggled with an eating disorder.

“By my senior year I was on the brink of death and asked to leave university in order to seek treatment for anorexia,” she says. Her struggles led her to experimenting with art, returning to a pursuit she had earlier dismissed because it wasn’t “professional” enough.

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In the spring of 2017, during her final year at the University of Pennsylvania in the US city of Philadelphia, Chandiramani took a class on murals.

“Philadelphia is covered with beautiful murals that initially started in the ’80s as an anti-graffiti programme with a mission to combat crime and foster education and community,” she says. “The class taught us about the significance of public art in building community and in shaping a city and its culture.”

When she returned to Hong Kong in 2018, she was happy to find another burgeoning street art movement. While working at the Women’s Foundation, a non-profit organisation promoting gender equality, she took part in the street art festival HKWalls. “I painted a wall outside Craftissimo, a popular craft beer store, in Sheung Wan,” she says.

Chandiramani (right) in front of her artwork in San Francisco. Photo: Riya Chandiramani

The Sheung Wan wall was Chandiramani’s first big solo project. Until then, she’d worked on many personal commissions, including custom-painting sneakers, alcohol bottles, handbags and homewares.

Larger Hong Kong projects followed the Sheung Wan work, including painting a mural at Li & Fung’s innovation hub Explorium in Kowloon; the feature mural of the wine bar ThinkWine in Central, which depicts the story of wine; and creating designs on merchandise for fitness apparel brand Lululemon’s 2020 Lunar New Year collection.

Painting the Sheung Wan wall changed her life, Chandiramani says. “I decided to paint the ‘Pursuit of Happiness’, a topic stemming from my Vedanta classes [a philosophy which expresses the principles of life and living], about how our egoistic selves seek happiness from material things, status and power,” she says.

Cap’n Crunch by Riya Chandiramani. Photo: Riya Chandiramani

In 2018, she published her first children’s book, Koki’s Voice, which she wrote and illustrated herself. The following year, she spoke about her journey and the intersection of art and mental health at the Affordable Art Fair in Hong Kong.

Kashmira Mehta Doshi, 34, is another Hong Kong-based artist with Indian roots. Best known for her paintings Absolute Mumbai and Absolute Hong Kong, which afford a visual journey into the architecture, lifestyle and fashion of both of the cities she has called home, Doshi grew up in Mumbai, where she went to art school and then took a marketing degree. Marriage brought her to Hong Kong in 2014, where she began reconnecting with art.

Doshi has experimented with a wide range of styles and explored oil paints, watercolours, acrylic and ink. She’s studied human anatomy and calligraphy, and has done portraits and nudes. “I do not believe in restricting myself to any particular genre or theme,” she says.

Artist and art tutor Kashmira Mehta Doshi with some of her works in Hong Kong. Photo: Kashmira Mehta Doshi

Sketching is the style she finds most captivating. “To me, sketching is like breathing,” she says. “It’s pure drawing; very close to my heart.”

Absolute Hong Kong and Absolute Mumbai both feature intensive black sketching on white canvas, every centimetre filled with scenes from daily life and much-loved local haunts.

“I’m not a world traveller, but I do love exploring the cities I live in,” Doshi says. “I observe the minutest of details and that reflects in my art. I’ve spent my life in these two cities, evolving, growing, achieving, failing and healing. I definitely wanted to let those emotions out on canvas.

Absolute Mumbai by Doshi. Photo: Kashmira Mehta Doshi
Absolute Hong Kong by Doshi. Photo: Kashmira Mehta Doshi

“I believe Mumbai is a city that never lets you sleep because it teaches you to dream and work towards achieving it,” she adds. “In Mumbai as a child, I was always filled with dreams that I wanted to achieve. But in those days, I was like the caterpillar, still struggling. In Hong Kong, I had the chance to turn into a butterfly and chase those dreams to make them come true.”

At the Affordable Art Fair in 2018, Doshi realised how under-represented Indian art was, despite its diversity of styles and influences. “I spoke to some Chinese and Korean artists at the fair who told me that artists from around the world exhibited here regularly, but there was a void with Indian art. They’d never seen much of it,” she says.

Doshi’s current passion lies in guiding artists as much as it does in creating. Today, she teaches art to students of all ages and runs the Kashunutz Art Studio in Tsim Sha Tsui.

Doshi working on a new piece. Photo: Kashmira Mehta Doshi

In a different type of art endeavour, Memeraki is a Hong Kong-based label that sells wooden clutch handbags painted in an Indian style.

Founded by Yosha Gupta, 38, who was born in northern India but has lived in Hong Kong for 11 years, Memeraki is intended to help revive traditional hand-painted Indian folk art by fusing contemporary fashion with folk culture. Ultimately, Gupta wants this fusion to help create sustainable livelihoods for traditional and folk artists.

With the support of the Indian consulate in Hong Kong and other sponsors, Memeraki organised the first Indian wall mural festival, Kathaa, in the city in January. Four folk artists from India visited Hong Kong and painted wall murals at Bharat Bhawan – the official residence of the Indian consul-general – and at cafes and restaurants Treehouse, Teakha, Sabor and Gunpowder.

A model with one of Memeraki’s wooden bags painted in an Indian style. Photo: Memeraki
A model with one of Memeraki’s wooden bags. Photo: Memeraki

During the Covid-19 lockdown, Memeraki ran traditional and folk art workshops online for an international audience. Artists from smaller towns and villages across India were able to teach art to anyone across the world.

“Our participants have been from the USA, UK, Australia, France, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sweden, Malaysia, Bangladesh, New Zealand and India, and all of this has spread from our previous customers and via word of mouth,” Gupta says. “We have organised close to 100 workshops in the last three-and-a-half months attended by more than 1,000 adults and children.”

Venkat Shyam, 50, based in the Indian city of Bhopal and author of the book Finding My Way, taught central Indian Gond painting in his Memeraki workshop. “I’ve worked with Memeraki for many years,” he says.

Venkat Shyam taught central Indian Gond painting in his Memeraki workshop. Photo: Venkat Shyam

Before he turned to art in the 1990s, Shyam struggled. “I’ve driven a rickshaw, cooked, done household work, was a signboard painter.” He worked 18-hour days to earn extra money so he could travel to exhibitions to promote his Gond tribal art. Today his paintings are frequently featured in exhibitions in Mumbai and Delhi and he is a regular on the Hong Kong arts scene.

Shyam was one of the mural painters who visited Hong Kong in January; he painted a man making many cups of tea at Teakha cafe.

Much of his work is about the need to protect the environment, like his Mother Earth painting, which is now a part of the CSMVS Children’s Museum in Mumbai.

Mother Earth by Venkat Shyam. Photo: Venkat Shyam

“Humans believe that everything belongs to them, when in reality everything we have – animals, plants, insects – it all belongs to Mother Earth” he says. “We should stop being selfish and protect her.”

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