Luke Ching on his journey from artist, to observer, to activist
- After witnessing the Queen’s Pier protest in 2007, Ching started to question what it meant to be local in Hong Kong
- His campaigns have included getting museum security guards seats, before doing the same for supermarket staff
Winning arts and minds: My father came to Hong Kong from Guangzhou in the mid-1950s and got a job making plastic moulds. My mother grew up on a fishing boat in Aberdeen. She worked in a factory making gloves before she met my dad. After they married, they moved to a public housing estate in Shau Kei Wan. I’m the third of four kids. My mother became a housewife, but when times were hard, she’d set up a stall on the street to sell clothes.
I went to Salesian School – it was an all-boys school, even the teachers were men, which was a little boring. My HKCEE (Hong Kong Certificate of Education Examination) results weren’t great, so I repeated them at a private school. It was the first time I had female classmates. I wasn’t very good at languages, but I was good at art.
The JUPAS (Joint University Programmes Admissions System) was launched in 1990, which was lucky because the faculty were still working out how to recruit students and although my grades weren’t great I got an interview with the Fine Arts Department at Chinese University. It went well, and I was given a firm offer, which meant I didn’t need to sit my A-levels.
Private tour: I really enjoyed my time at university. I spent five years doing my undergraduate degree in fine arts and stayed on to do a two-year master’s. In the 90s, when I was studying, people were thinking about the run-up to the handover, but inside our school we were isolated from society and I did a lot of art for art’s sake. I attended a mixed-media class, which really opened my eyes – I was free to use different things to create my work, it was inspiring.
At school we’d been taught skills, but here the focus was on concepts, not the craft. It was a good life. I lived in halls, which wasn’t expensive, and was paid as a graduate assistant. In 1996, I won a prize to go to Paris. I got chatting to a French sculptor in a bar in Paris whose job was to repair sculptures in the Louvre. He asked if I’d like to go into the museum with him when it was closed. It was after hours and the lights were off. I couldn’t see the Mona Lisa, so he said, “Use your flash to take a picture.” It was an amazing experience being in there without the crowds of tourists.