‘The monster that’s devoured everything’: Syrian artist’s Hong Kong show is a response to the horrors of war

Come rain or shine, Fadi Yazigi insists on walking to his studio every working day, even when there is a chance of bombs exploding along the familiar route from his home in Damascus. This is how the Syrian artist copes with a devastating war that has ripped his country apart and, four years in, seems depressingly interminable.

“I have to pretend nothing is happening. I don’t want to just wait for it to stop,” he says from the safe confines of the Yallay Gallery in Wong Chuk Hang, on the south side of Hong Kong Island, where owner Jean-Marc Decrop is hosting the artist’s first solo exhibition in Asia.

Yazigi, 49, works in the old city area of the Syrian capital. It is among the longest continually inhabited settlements in the world and redolent at every corner of 9,000 years of history. That history flows through Yazigi’s art.

On show in Hong Kong is a row of rough, miniature reliefs made with red clay that are tableaux from his own life. These hark back to Sumerian clay tablets, on which the first written language in Mesopotamia appeared.

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The thick, black outlines of the figures in the large ink paintings hanging nearby produce an almost chiaroscuro effect and pay tribute to the region’s ancient sculptures, which enchanted artists such as Henry Moore. Yazigi favours local materials, such as the clay that generations of houses have been built with, and the ink used to dye local fabric.

The references to the region’s heritage are heartbreaking. Since 2011, the world has looked in disbelief as the destruction wrought on ancient monuments in Syria by Islamic State militants and pro-government forces.

IS controls the ancient city of Palmyra and has been systematically blowing up its monuments after beheading Khaled al-Asaad, the city’s head of antiquities, in August. The Arch of Triumph, built by the Romans, is gone, The Temple of Bel no more than a memory.

And then there is the huge loss of lives. Some estimates put the death toll in Syria at a quarter of a million people since 2011. That doesn’t include the many refugees who have died on their way to Europe.

Amid the death and destruction, Yazigi creates art that makes no direct, graphic reference to the horror. But it’s there in the form of a bird-like, mythical beast which popped up among the clay tablets that mostly depict family life in the Yazigi household.