Member of the Legislative Council, Christine Loh
Best known as a leading voice in public policy, she shares with Cassandra Chan not only her love for politics, but also for the arts.
After a 14-year career as a commodities trader, Christine Loh was first appointed to the Hong Kong Legislative Council in 1992 and ran two successful elections in 1995 and 1998 as a member of the Citizens Party. She fought for rural land inheritance rights for the indigenous women of the New Territories and passed the groundbreaking Protection of the Harbour ordinance. She’s now the CEO and co-founder of an independent, non-profit public-policy think tank called Civic Exchange.
I enjoyed growing up in Hong Kong. I had lots of friends. Our house at Tung Shan Terrace had a garden with a bamboo grove, and the neighborhood children and I used to go up to the Stubbs Road end of Bowen Road to explore and play.
I was nine years old when my parents separated in 1965. So from that age I spent a lot more time with my mother and stepfather, who’s a designer. He’s a very arty person, really into shapes, colors and design, so that’s something I’ve always been very interested in too. During that time I started to draw and read a lot.
My memory of my biological father represented the more distant but distinct world of “Shanghai” – the ancestral home of the Lohs – and the Shanghainese culture. He came to Hong Kong in 1948.
My mother was a career woman and went to work every day, so my memory of her, particularly as a young child, is that she was extraordinarily beautiful. I learned women can be smart and go to work. This became the norm for how I see women.
When I was young, we had all these art books and magazines in the house. I spent a lot of time reading them, so by the age of 10 I knew all the names of great designers and all the famous modern furniture designs by name. I became very interested in shapes, size, colors and the placement of things.
Our house had some of the most famous and eclectic pieces of modern furniture during the mid-60s and early 70s. So I became much more attuned to the notion of design, which was very easily translatable to other forms of art. But my personal taste in the visual arts developed over time into a preference for figurative art.