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Richard James Havis

Born in Hong Kong in 1954, Josephine Cheung Shuk-fong died in 1989 just as she was starting to make a mark on the art world. The painter grew up in Sheung Shui, then a rural part of the city, and died in Toronto, Canada, from lung cancer at the age of 35.
Cheung moved to Canada in the 1970s and spent the rest of her short life there, apart from a year in New York.
The paintings she left behind either went into storage at her husband’s Montreal gallery or were sold privately, while others were kept at her family’s home in Toronto. They disappeared from view completely.
That changed in June, when Alisan Fine Arts’ New York gallery held a commemorative exhibition of Cheung’s works that blend abstract expressionism and figurative painting.

Behind the exhibition is a moving story of a loyal friend’s tireless campaign to restore Cheung’s place in art history.
Hong Kong-born Nancy Mei-yu Tong is a New York-based documentary filmmaker.
Tong was studying film at York University in Toronto when she met Cheung in the mid-1970s, who was studying art at the nearby Ontario College of Art (OCA), now the Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCAD U). They became close friends and the two kept in touch for the rest of Cheung’s life.
Tong wanted to make Cheung’s paintings available to the public after she died in 1989.
“Before she died, she told a mutual friend that she wanted us to sell all of her paintings,” Tong says, adding that Cheung wanted the money raised to be donated to the OCA, which had recognised her talent and awarded her a series of scholarships.

After Cheung’s death, Tong spoke to Cheung’s husband, Andrew Lui, an artist who also ran a gallery, and told him about the request. “I said she did not have time to sign a will, but this is what she wanted,” Tong says.
Lui told Tong that he was not aware of Cheung’s wishes and declined Tong’s request to take charge of the paintings. Lui later remarried. After he died in 2021, his widow unexpectedly contacted Tong.
Lui’s widow said she had found some of Cheung’s works among Lui’s possessions. And when Tong contacted Cheung’s family in Toronto to tell them that Lui had died, they told her that they had some of Cheung’s work, too.
Tong reunited the two sets of pictures, and a friend suggested that Tong show the paintings to Alisan in Hong Kong. The New York exhibition resulted from that.

Daniel Chen, director of Alisan New York, said he was immediately impressed by the works when Tong showed them to him.
“I found Cheung’s paintings to be vibrant and full of movement,” Chen says. “They had a distinct personality. For an artist who was so young, her work already seemed quite serious and mature.”
The gallery showed 23 works spanning Cheung’s career, showing her speedy progression from pure abstraction to a style that incorporated objects and people.
Cheung’s journey into art is as fascinating as the manner of her rediscovery.
She had no contact with art while growing up in Hong Kong, where her father owned a shop that sold frozen meat.
It was not until she moved to Toronto to attend school at the age of 17 – her older brother was already studying there – that she first encountered art in a meaningful way. She was fascinated and quickly decided to become a painter.

She was accepted into the Ontario College of Art in 1975, when abstract expressionism was the dominant movement in the Canadian art scene, writes art history professor Jane Roos in an essay about the exhibition.
Cheung took to the style and became especially interested in colour theory, although she was more of an intuitive painter than a theoretician, Tong says. “She painted fast, and allowed her instincts to lead her.”
Cheung’s earliest works, usually untitled, were influenced by artists such as Mark Rothko, but this began to change when she moved to New York to study for a year in 1980.
“It was the time of Keith Haring and [Jean-Michel] Basquiat, and street art was everywhere – on the subway, on the buildings,” Tong says, adding that New York street art inspired Cheung to move away from pure abstraction.

Her works began to feature squares representing the windows of New York skyscrapers. A 1981 untitled picture divides the canvas into nine rough-hewn squares, these “windows” featuring blurry glimpses of human reflections.
An untitled acrylic painting from 1983, more German expressionist than abstract expressionist, goes further by depicting square and rectangular shapes that seem to represent buildings.
Cheung felt her year in New York was a turning point.
“Before New York, I never doubted the concept of clarity in the language of abstract art, such as the use of colour and lines,” she said in a 1986 interview with Hong Kong’s Art Currents magazine. “But then I discovered abstract art lacks what it is to be human – I wanted to express more than pure concepts.”
Back living in Toronto, Cheung took a job as a social worker to support herself, helping newly arrived immigrants – mainly Vietnamese “boatpeople” – adapt to the city. She would paint in the evenings, focusing on one painting at a time, spending around five days on each.
Her works started to reference people, although often obliquely – something that Tong ascribes to the human contact that arose from her day job.
“Every day, she spent all her time helping people settle in. That affected her,” Tong says.

An untitled 1984 painting contains a face that Roos describes as “a curvilinear oblong with closed eyelids, thin nose, and black mouth [which] bears a resemblance to the features of an Inuit mask”.
Woman, created in 1987, is a highly abstract representation of a female body, with a mouth that Tong has playfully likened to the popular video game character Pacman.
Cheung spent the last few years of her life in Montreal with Lui, who married her just before she died in 1989. Her final works, the enigmatically entitled In Limbo series, are darker in tone and colour.
Tong says we should not necessarily ascribe the darkness of Cheung’s later works to her illness; she did not know she was sick. Cheung had been feeling ill and thought she had a bad cold or bronchitis.
She went to the hospital and had an X-ray, and was told she had two to four months left, Tong recalls Cheung telling her. She died two months later from lung cancer, Tong says, noting that Cheung was not a smoker.
Tong is happy to have finally fulfilled her friend’s last request and is pleased that the public will now be able to appreciate her work.
Alisan’s Chen says that her rediscovered work is something of a beacon for Asian-American art and that a portion of the sales proceeds will go toward a scholarship in Cheung’s name at OCAD U.
“Generations of Asian-American artists have been working here in the US, with only a small handful who have been recognised over the last few decades,” Chen says.
“It’s wonderful to see that art institutions and the fine-art audience as a whole are now rediscovering these artists, not because of their ‘Asian-ness’, but because they stand on their own as distinct, compelling voices that enrich the history of art in this country.”
“Josephine Shuk-Fong Cheung: A Commemorative Exhibition” was held at Alisan Fine Arts, New York, from June 24 to July 3.


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Hong Kong-born artist Josephine Cheung’s commemorative exhibition was recently held at Alisan Fine Arts in New York. Photo: courtesy of Alisan Fine Arts

Untitled (1984), by Josephine Cheung. Photo: Josephine Cheung

Visitors browse works at Josephine Cheung’s commemorative exhibition at Alisan Fine Arts in New York. Photo: Alisan Fine Arts

Untitled (1983), by Josephine Cheung. Photo: Josephine Cheung

Daniel Chen (centre), director of Alisan Fine Arts New York, speaks to visitors at the opening of the exhibition. Photo: Alisan Fine Arts

Woman (1987), by Josephine Cheung. Photo: Josephine Cheung

In Limbo No. 9 (1989), by Josephine Cheung. Photo: Josephine Cheung

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--POST MAGAZINE HAS FIRST USAGE RIGHTS-

Handout image shows Entrance to Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, after renovation.  (UCCA Picasso show)

[POST MAGAZINE]

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Josephine Cheung’s paintings vanished from view after her death at 35. A loyal friend worked tirelessly to restore her place in art history


Josephine Cheung’s paintings vanished from view after her death at 35. A loyal friend worked tirelessly to restore her place in art history.


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