Chui Pui-chee's calligraphy brings traditional art to life

Chui Pui-chee is an anachronism. When other twenty-something artists were experimenting with multimedia conceptual installations, he went up to Hangzhou's China Academy of Art and spent six years studying Chinese calligraphy.

Now in his mid-30s, Chui remains firmly wedded to traditional scrolls and silk screens. His raison d'être is to make traditional art relevant without fiddling too much with form.

Despite the scholarly style of Chui's calligraphy, he has his feet very much on the ground. His new solo exhibition at Grotto Fine Art is steeped in his own struggles with high property prices and the pressure of being a young, working parent in Hong Kong. Beyond the poetic beauty of his cursive script is a Munchian scream.

The exhibition has some familiar elements, such as the way he gives dignity and weight to pop lyrics by copying them onto traditional scrolls. This time, he has picked out plaintive lines from songs such as Eason Chan's Bicycle, Sammi Cheng's High Mountains and Deep Valleys and Qi Qin's Night Night Night Night, and deliberately used very watery ink so that some of the words have spread and blurred on paper. "I want to give the impression of tears," he says.

A number of his scrolls are less than 30cm wide - they are about the width of the bedroom windows he saw in a show flat a few years ago. "I was shocked that Hong Kong people have to slave away all their life to afford a small flat, and are still not allowed to have enough light when they return home at the end of the day," he says.