Hong Kong artist, 95, on teaching himself to draw, his Sunday painting box, and his big break
Hon Chi-fun, the recipient of this year’s Asia Society arts award talks about growing up in 1920s Hong Kong, going to New York in the heyday of abstract expressionism and the looming spectre of death
I was born an artist. Nobody taught me. My father was an uneducated driver and there were eight of us – seven boys and, the youngest, a girl. I grew up in Pok Fu Lam. I remember my father getting up early in the morning to deliver fresh milk and we would take turns to ride with him. The milk van was freezing cold but we all enjoyed looking out of the window. Later, he became the sixth person in Hong Kong to get a taxi licence.
My first school was a traditional Chinese private school called Chiu Yin. It was run by an old man and his son near Nathan Road, in Kowloon, and, unfortunately for me, they practised corporal punishment. My problem was that I laughed too much. The principal puffed on his pipe all day long and it would set me off if he made a funny sucking sound, or if he tugged at his beard in a certain way. He hated it, and would ask his son to come and give me a good whip. I did get something out of it, though. At Chiu Yin, they taught us classical Chinese and forced us to memorise a lot of poems and passages. That’s why my Chinese has always been pretty good and why I’ve always loved calligraphy.
A few years later I enrolled at Wah Yan College, in Kowloon. I was glad I had a chance to learn English because you needed that to get anywhere in life. My family couldn’t afford the fees so I had to keep winning scholarships by staying at the top of my class.
I always liked to draw as a child and I taught myself how. After the war I became a postal inspector. I did that for quite a few years but that was just a job, not a career. My entire being outside office hours was about art. In the 1950s and 60s, I went out to sketch every Sunday with a group of other artists that included Luis Chan Fook-sin. He was a bit older, more experienced, and he used to laugh at the rest of us as we tried to frame our landscapes very seriously. “Just put a pile of crap here, and a pile of crap there,” he would say. He blew my mind away.