(Art)Work From Home

Hector Chan’s “The Scenes” is a series of paintings that represents the recollection of images and rediscovers the desire of seeing by capturing iconic scenes from movie classics. His paintings are fluid-like cinematic scenes that excites the viewer’s eye with expressive brushstrokes and colours. Chan dedicates his artistic practice to the search in new ways in adapting paintings to an image-flooding era. Choosing to paint on pleather, he sets his heart on fluent mark making with less friction when compared to the surfaces of traditional medium like canvases or wood, and as a result, a wider spectrum of gesture can be formed. In his “If Van Gogh” series, Chan invents a little piece of art history relating to the popular painter Vincent van Gogh with a strong sense of humour and playfulness. For instance, in the work “Kam (1895)”, Chan paints the portrait of the female lead character from the Hong Kong movie Golden Chicken to suggest if a tragedy could have been altered by raising the question “what if Van Gogh met and fell in love with a different prostitute?” 

The rural landscape of the New Territories is a recurrent focus in Cheung Tsz Hin’s paintings, at times accompanied by a vague figure of a child’s back or his side, who is either looking away, hiding behind an abandoned sofa, or covering his head with a pillow in a bed of flowers. His face cannot be seen directly but a strong sense of intimacy and inseparability can be felt through the gloomy air and thin layers of paint. Cheung describes his works as very personal, while combining his past memories with the present scenery of the places where he was brought up and belongs, hence giving voice to peace and harmony. There is something uncertain and fragile, full of solitude in the breeze of his light colours and in the passing of time, that keeps reminding his audience of their own roots. When it comes to a year living under the pandemic, more of his emphasis has shifted towards observing family