Chow Chun-fai
Award-winning local artist Chow Chun-fai has long been involved with Hong Kong art and culture. During this year’s Legislative Council elections, he ran for the position of Sports, Performing Arts, Culture and Publication Functional Constituency—and lost to ex-Arts Development Council chairman Ma Fung-kwok. Ahead of the elections, he told Leanne Mirandilla about his family life, his path as an artist, and why he decided to get involved in politics.
I’m locally born. I was brought up here. I had all my education here. I thought of studying overseas but I was too poor.
My parents are not well educated. It’s very difficult for them to totally understand the political situation. It always reminds me of how the general public receives political messages. I could be talking about something too “high”—art, ideology—which common people, like my parents, won’t understand. They always remind me that if I’m doing something for the public, it has to be about the public.
In the beginning, I didn’t know what kind of art I wanted to do. My first prize was actually for script-writing, not painting. But [in the end] I decided to pick up visual arts. I finished high school and went into the Chinese University’s fine art department. But at that time I actually didn’t know anything about art at all.
There are many taxis in my paintings because my father was a taxi driver. When I was still an art student, he decided to be an owner. We didn’t have money, so we borrowed from the bank. We had to pay a very heavy loan. Taxi licenses are extremely expensive —it’s now $5.6 million for one, and there are only 10,000 licenses in Hong Kong. It’s crazy!
My father got sick in the first month because he [had] a stroke. He’s fine, but he can’t talk or walk. For a long period of time—around seven to eight years—I ran the taxis and paid the loans. Now I feel that it was a very important experience. I painted from my own daily life, and recorded my own history.
People think that if you’re an art student you’re too unrealistic, romantic, into your own dreams. But I learned how to be an artist and survive in the actual world. I became more practical when I was studying.