Michelle Fung
A Chinese woman raised in Canada, artist Michelle Fung has a unique style-contemporary pop surrealism art with an oriental twist. Having just celebrated her studio’s opening with a group painting session, Fung talks to Samuel Lai about cherry blossoms and her religious faith in art.
HK Magazine: Do you have a favorite motif as an artist?
Michelle Fung: Cherry blossoms [aka sakura]! They are simply magical. I used to live in Vancouver, and I love how these beautiful pink, fluffy trees enchant the city during springtime. Cherry blossoms demonstrate one of my favorite artistic concepts—“mono no aware,” literally “the pathos of things.” It is a Japanese term used to describe the awareness of impermanence. Such awareness of the transience of all things enhances appreciation of their beauty, and evokes a gentle, wistful sadness at their passing.
As you can see in my art studio, I also love drawing trees—roots and branches and all. Their seeds, thriving branches and withered leaves illustrate Buddha’s first noble truth—that the suffering of birth, old age, sickness and death is unavoidable. Every single tree in my drawings is a tree of life.
HK: Are you religious—say, a Buddhist or a spiritualist?
MF: Not really, but you might say that art is my faith. Like religion, it mends one’s broken soul, as well as heals one’s wretched past. One of my friends saw this picture of a boy and girl lying with a sakura tree, and she told me it reminded her of all these late-night tear-filled conversations with her husband, a chef who lost his sense of taste after an accident.
The drawing immensely touched her and relieved the burden of her difficult time in the past. To me, art itself is something of absolute beauty and goodness. In this sense, art is very similar to religion. However, once art enters man-made infrastructures such as galleries, museums and art brokerage companies, a lot of things inevitably become much more complicated.
HK: Many artists—Ai Wei-wei, for instance—are also activists who fight against ambiguous censorship of artistic practice, as well as strive for a civil society in which different forms of expression can freely develop. Would you consider yourself to be such an artist?
MF: Works of some other artists are more critical, or of more relation to society. My art pieces tend to be more personal. Artists must be genuine. I am trying to convey something I truly believe in my work. They may not relate to the society, but they are delicate, often multi-layered messages straight from my heart. I often think of my work as my third hand, reaching out to other people whom I couldn’t reach physically.
Activists or not, I think all artists are trying touch people’s hearts. Sometimes that might be difficult, and Hong Kong is often depicted as a cultural desert. But I see a lot of energy among the local artists in Hong Kong, and I am happy to be a part of it.