Hong Kong’s rich cosmopolitan heritage has nurtured worldly artistic talent including Fatina Kong, whose paintings often use her home city as both a backdrop and inspiration, and draw on the influence of traditional Chinese painting and Western media. “Nothing stays the same and nothing is permanent,” she says.
Kong, a graduate of Hong Kong’s Academy of Visual Arts, says the first time she exhibited her work, at Art Central in 2021, proved a transformative experience.
“At the art fair or an exhibition in a gallery, I need to talk to different strangers and different collectors,” she says. “Maybe they have different backgrounds or come from all over the world and after talking to them, I will know more about my painting, actually from different perspectives.
“I think that gives me confidence because it makes me think of myself as an artist, not just some random person doing art at the studio and no one sees it.”
Kong also received funding from a government-sponsored programme to visit Shanghai on a cultural exchange with her counterparts in the central Chinese metropolis. “Before that experience, I always used one perspective to depict the landscape,” she says.
“After I went to Shanghai, I saw many beautiful thangka paintings on a really big scale. There are, like, 30-metre-long paintings that tell a really long Buddhist story. They use different dimensions to tell the story and different angles to paint the different elements. It’s really interesting.”
The valuable experiences she gained from this exchange and the international exposure of exhibiting her work at events such as Art Central make Kong optimistic about working as an artist.
She says both public and private sector support for the city’s art community continues to grow, providing artists with many opportunities to shine.
“Hopefully, Hong Kong artists will have their really iconic style, or not just a style, [but] a place in the world,” she says. “Hong Kong has always been known as a city of finance, but I hope it will also be known as a city of art.”
