Art and food at Ashley Sutton’s latest creation, Dear Lilly
Spanish-born, Hong Kong-based artist Cristina Moroño talks about art - and the restaurant's decor and food
Dear Lilly is a new restaurant-bar in a familiar location - on the fourth floor podium level at the IFC Mall, which comprises a rooftop terrace overlooking the harbour. I’m here to meet Spanish-born, Hong Kong-based artist Cristina Moroño, and gallerist Adriana Álvarez-Nichol, and all three of us are early. We cast our eyes around Dear Lilly’s interior with some interest.
Restaurant group Dining Concepts engaged Ashley Sutton - the brainchild behind splendidly bedecked spaces such as Ophelia, The Iron Fairies and Yojimbo - for this latest venture. Dear Lilly is crammed with pseudo-Parisian imagery, bouquets and William Morris-esque motifs. Melding such a look with the underlying architecture of this space is a challenge: the structure is made up of harsh diagonals, brutal lines and steel stanchions. Aesthetically, then, Dear Lilly feels like a Victorian boudoir stuffed into a shipping container. And it almost works - but you never quite forget that you’re sitting on top of a shopping mall.
Video by Matthew Furniss
It’s 2pm and the lunch rush is still in full swing; we’re perched at a small table in the middle of the throng, waiting until a suitable space becomes available. So it’s an ideal time to find out more about Moroño.
She studied printmaking at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid before achieving a master’s in fine art. Her career has been defined by experimentation: a mixed-media artist, she has merged different practices, including photography, etching, engraving, collage, papermaking and painting, shaped by her travels. She relocated from her native Spain to New York in 2003, where she lived and worked for more than a decade, before moving to Hong Kong.
It was a bold leap. “I knew no one here,” she says. “It was 2013 and I knew nothing about Hong Kong - Puerta Roja gallery gave me this opportunity.” She gestures to Adriana Álvarez-Nichol, who founded Puerta Roja - one of a new wave of art galleries to have opened in Hong Kong over the past decade, giving Moroño and other artists
new platforms.
