Hongkong Land Artists

Hongkong Land has nurtured a relationship with local artists for years by exhibiting their works in public spaces across town. In a new exhibition, they’ve chosen five local artists with works that aim to inspire passersby or art lovers alike. Evelyn Lok speaks to three of the five: Danny Li Wan-fai, C.C. Lee, and Chu Tat-shing, about their art, as well as the perpetual struggle of the artist in Hong Kong.

Reading Time:3 minutes

Published: 4:00pm, 10 Apr 2014Updated: 4:06pm, 19 Oct 2016

HK Magazine: Do you explicitly try to use artistic language that reflects China or Chinese culture?

C.C. Lee: I don’t think so. It’s not on purpose, but a very natural process. Probably it’s the same with Mr. Chu as well. We’re standing in front of China, but a lot of the information and culture that filters in is western. We grew up in Hong Kong, and it just inevitably created this kind of visual language that inspired us.

Chu Tat-shing: Our creations usually follow our own personal conceptualizing, and we don’t think to make art from specifically an eastern angle or a western angle, or whatever; those are other people’s perceptions.

HK: Should your works be seen as an amalgamation of east and west?

CT: For one of the works, I was inspired by Chinese mythology, depicted in Han Dynasty mosaics. The ancestral deities Fuxi and Nuwa [who represent heaven and earth] were shown with human heads and serpent bodies, entwined together. [Fuxi and Nuwa] are also to do with yin and yang; it’s a dichotomy—like positive and negative space—and encasing that sense of dichotomy within a solid sculpture is what I’m very interested in. Abstract expression is not just western, it’s also eastern.

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