Two self-described “diehard oil painters” in Hong Kong are mounting an exhibition together to celebrate a genre that has defied periodic declarations of its imminent extinction. “First, photography was supposed to kill it off. Then, it was conceptual art,” says Celia Ko Tin-yan, who will show her latest works alongside those of Carol Ho in the exhibition titled “When Parallel Worlds Collide”. “When I came back [to Hong Kong] from the US in the mid-1990s, I was shocked by the extent to which conceptual installations had taken over the local art scene. People kept telling me that representational art was totally out of fashion.” How things have changed. Figurative paintings now feature prominently in Hong Kong galleries and art fairs, and Ko is busy juggling teaching commitments and her own studio work now that her speciality is back in vogue. There are different theories as to why young people are picking up oil paintings in Hong Kong. Some put it down to market demand, while others suggest that the practice captures the zeitgeist. But for these two artists, coincidentally both living with a form of disability, painting has always been how they mainly express themselves. The title of the exhibition invites comparisons between their very different practices. Meet MonoC – virtual influencer, poseur and future NFT artist Ko’s meticulous portraits and still-life paintings are highly realistic and capture the ordinariness of faded family photos or rather twee household objects. In these sepia-tone paintings, aged artefacts are packed in bubble wrap as if they are about to be taken away. “These are objects that symbolise collective memories. Memories are like relics. They are isolated from daily life and objectified, hence the bubble wrap,” she says. She feels that her art is “feminine” because family history has mainly been told down the female line: stories told to her grandmother, her mother, and now by her. And that is often the case with history on an intimate rather than a grand, national scale, she says. If Ko’s sense of history is a gentle and continuous stream, then Ho’s is one made up of violent and disturbing collisions. Her works are surreal portraits of women disfigured by strange objects. Face Collapsed (2021) shows a woman in a spacesuit with her head wrapped in a scarf in the same style as Van Gogh after he cut off his ear. Her featureless face within a space helmet is pinched like gathered fabric, with strange, flesh-coloured horns sticking out from where the nose should be. “The face of the woman in this painting is being twisted by the attached amorphous object which broke the glass helmet,” she explains. The strange object is based on the sculptures of the Modernist artist Jean Arp. It is a visual analogy suggesting that our aesthetic values may be based on something very different from our own experience – an alien that can blind us, she says. She “quotes” Arp and Constantin Brâncuși, another Modernist sculptor, in her art ironically, because they turned women into elegant, stylish, abstract objects and their sense of aesthetics has been raised to such a position of privilege that they remain influential today in art and design. “I call my paintings the ultimate in self-objectification”, she says. Ko says: “We don’t think of ourselves as women when we paint. We just do what comes to us naturally. But looking at our art, our themes do reflect a female point of view.” They are both wary of the popularity of oil paintings, noting that it hasn’t necessarily encouraged a habit of looking closely. When people swipe from one image to another on their phone, they don’t see the texture of paint or think about how the artists create a dialogue with art history, Ko says. “Perhaps I am hypersensitive to how we see things because I was born with one eye that is much weaker than the other, and I am very short-sighted. I have very bad depth perception and so I have had to teach myself how to make sense of perspective,” she says. For Ho, who has a hearing impairment, her disability has meant that she relies more on visual signs in her everyday life and that has probably sharpened her sensibility to images, she says. Ko says: “There are many similarities between us. We both went to art schools in the West. We both belong to a generation that did not embrace paintings for many years. And we are both diehard painters. That’s why we want to show our works side by side. I can’t wait to see what happens when they interact with each other.” “When Parallel Worlds Collide”, art/home, 23 New Market Street, Sheung Wan, 11am – 7pm, Tue-Sun. Feb 17-Mar 3.