Chinese diaspora artists’ contemporary ink paintings, Ha Bik-chuen archive project on show in Hong Kong at Tai Kwun

Works by Hong Kong artists including the King of Kowloon and Frog King, and overseas Chinese artists such as Yang Jiechang feature in ‘Ink City’ exhibition

Items from the archive of the late Ha Bik-chuen, and commissioned works inspired by his eclectic legacy, feature in a second exhibition at Tai Kwun

3-MIN READ3-MIN

Massacre (1982) by Yang Jiechang, featured in “Ink City”, an exhibition at Tai Kwun Contemporary in Central, Hong Kong. Photo: Enid Tsui

Published: 3:15pm, 22 Apr 2021Updated: 2:47pm, 23 Apr 2021

Two very different exhibitions in Tai Kwun, the heritage arts complex in Hong Kong’s Central district – one about ink art and the other from the archives of the late Hong Kong artist Ha Bik-chuen – are linked by the themes of continuity and renewal.

In “Ink City”, works by 19 artists from the Chinese diaspora have been selected to represent the ceaseless reinvention of ink painting by generations of practitioners. In particular, it features works that reflect highly personal contemplations on contemporary urban life, from sexual desire to the National Security Law recently introduced in Hong Kong.

There is no discernible Chinese-ness in the ink-on-paper works of Panama-born Hong Kong artist Luis Chan Fook-sin (1905-1995). His Illegal Immigrants (1985) refers to an acrimonious identity turf war that is all too familiar. Back then, new arrivals in Hong Kong had caused social divisions and xenophobia that Chan captured imaginatively and powerfully in a tight, two-tier composition.

Nor is there any in Paris-based Yang Jiechang’s ink calligraphy Please Take Your Umbrella (2006) featuring an English text of a seemingly innocuous weather warning, which he painted to show alongside paintings of bomb explosions for an exhibition in Iran.

A Hongkong-Dutch Client Licking My Arm During The Massage Treatment (2015), by Evelyn Taocheng Wang, part of “Ink City”, an exhibition at Tai Kwun Contemporary in Central, Hong Kong. Photo: Enid Tsui

Hanging nearby is Yang’s earlier work Massacre (1982). It might have been a premonition of events seven years later in Beijing, but at the time the severed heads represented his resistance to Soviet-style socialist realism paintings, and a cathartic release as he decided to break free from academic constraints.

Lam Tung-pang’s Image-coated On The Day of 28 May, 2020 #1-3 (2020), three near-identical framed works on paper, are covered in seemingly random strokes in black ink. They were the results of a performance by the artist at the Hong Kong Museum of Art on the day the drafting of the National Security Law was announced.