Masters of traditional crafts in Hong Kong team up with younger artisans to create beautiful pieces for exhibition
- Hosted by Crafts on Peel, exhibition features nine collaborative works created by matching up five masters of traditional crafts with 13 younger artisans
- Running until March 25, the show tells a story of retrospection, yearning, arrivals and departures
Master Siu Ping-keung takes a small block of camphor wood and begins carving. His implements lie in a long surgical row before him. He hardly lifts his eyes as he exchanges one blade for another. He knows the worn feel of each one in his hand.
This demonstration is taking place at Crafts on Peel, a charitable organisation that focuses on reviving traditional craftsmanship. Although its name comes from the organisation’s location on Peel Street, it feels strangely appropriate as Siu pares the rind from the wood.
Soon a tiny face emerges. She’s a girl from China’s Qing dynasty, he says, aged about six “and very merry”. He likes to tell a story about what he’s creating.
What was life like in Hong Kong’s first jail? New digital show reveals all
A few more strokes and she’s 14. Her father has told her she must get married and put her hair up in a bun. A little bulge appears behind her hewn neck.
More peeling. Now she’s older, her forehand lined, her smile slightly hollowed.
“She’s still nice,” smiles Siu, holding her between his hands (his palms are themselves carved with notably long life lines). “But not to the daughter-in-law…” And for a second, you believe it.
Siu has been a wood carver for more than half a century. He began as an apprentice to his father, Siu Yue-cheong, when he was eight, kept it going in tandem with school, and eventually inherited the business.
He used to make household deities for the boats of Hong Kong’s Tanka people and he carved dragons and phoenixes on the pillars you can still see in older Chinese restaurants. Now he creates, or restores, sculptures for Taoist and Buddhist temples.
According to Penelope Luk, creative director of Crafts on Peel, he rarely does contemporary works. But he’s one of five traditional craftsmen who have collaborated with 13 younger artisans for Crafts on Peel’s current exhibition, “Hearts & Hands”, its fifth show since the charity launched in January 2020.
“We are matchmakers,” Luk says. “We get to know them, we support them and we nurture the work that you can see today. We hold their hands through their journey and we document their stories.”
She so loves Hong Kong’s secret abandoned houses, she held a dinner in one
There are nine collaborative works in the exhibition. Arise in Gallops, for example, is a collaboration between Siu and carpenter Ken Chow. In 2019, Chow co-founded Yat Muk Studio –the name, whose Chinese characters mean “one tree”, conveys “a lifetime of woodwork” - after learning his craft in Taiwan. He specialises in “mortise and tenon”, the traditional technique of fitting wooden pieces together.
In Arise in Gallops, Chow employed the technique to make a rosewood mahjong table with four chairs. He used a machine to carve a map of Hong Kong – the grooves of its outline filled with silver thread – on the tabletop.
Then Siu transformed the legs of the table and chairs into horse limbs, a reference to Hong Kong’s Happy Valley Racecourse, built by the British in 1845. He shod their hooves with little wooden horseshoes.
The beauty of mortise and tenon means Siu could carve eight zitan panels and slot them, puzzle-fashion, into the table’s four corners. The designs on the panels mirror the historic relationship between Hong Kong and the United Kingdom: for example, a panel showing Hong Kong’s Tsing Ma bridge is paired with one of London’s Tower Bridge; a scene of dragon-boat racers in Hong Kong’s Aberdeen area is matched with rowers on London’s River Thames.
The piece, commissioned by Crafts on Peel, will also go on show at London Craft Week in May, together with some of the other works from “Hearts & Hands”.
“Mahjong is about gossiping and relationship building, asking ‘Where do you live?’, that sort of thing,” Luk says. “Apart from being very beautiful, the table is a topic to start a conversation.”
On display alongside it is Mahjong Wanderlust – Hong Kong Theme, the work of another master carver.
Ricky Cheung began his apprenticeship in his father’s business, Fuk Hing Lung Mahjong Factory, in Kowloon City, when he was 13. He, too, has more than half a century of experience. The factory closed in 2009 and he retired in 2018, but he wanted to collaborate with a younger artisan who could bring fresh concepts to hand-carved tiles.
In this case, Crafts on Peel didn’t need to make a match. The relationship was genetic: Cheung works with his daughter, illustrator Karen Aruba.
“My whole family worked in that factory,” she says. “And when the economy changed and a lot of labourers went to China, my whole family lost their jobs.”
In 2020, she founded The Art of Mahjong Craft Studio with her father. Now she sketches such Hong Kong icons as the Star Ferry, the tram and pawnshops signs, which her father then carves onto the tiles (more complex designs are laser-engraved). The colours – red, blue, green and gold – are applied by hand.
We don’t want to do a firework exhibition – open! close! We want to sustain people, foster dialogue and create a community
They are not the only family relationship in the exhibition. KC & Pak, as they’re referred to in the exhibition, are a father (K.C.) and son (Pakho Ng). In 2018, they founded lighting design studio Noah & Grey (slogan: “Nostalgic for the old, hungry for the new”). In their case, there’s no generational hierarchy; they jointly describe themselves as contemporary artisans.
Their piece, Sternhalma, is a modern version of Chinese checkers. The name harks back to the original game, which had nothing to do with China. It was invented in the 1890s in Germany, where it was called Stern-Halma. Only later did it become culturally relevant in Hong Kong as a transient childhood pleasure in public housing estates.
“We wanted to make something that lasts longer,” says Pakho Ng, who trained as a mechanical engineer. “We wanted it to be beautiful to look at when you’re playing, and also when it’s stored.”
Instead of the usual cardboard, the board is made of walnut and maple; instead of marbles, there are rods of brass, copper and steel. Like mortise and tenon work, it, too, can be disassembled into geometric sections and folded away.
Making such a piece is a painstaking endeavour. Is there any money in it? “Good question, my mother also asks this,” Pakho Ng replies. “We’re not rolling in it, but we make enough to carry on the passion.”
As a non-profit organisation, Crafts on Peel is a platform, not a gallery.
“We don’t want to do a firework exhibition – open! close!” Luk says. “We want to sustain people, foster dialogue and create a community.”
Like Siu, she understands that craftsmanship should always have a story. “Of course, you need to believe they put their own feelings into the work,” she says. “Otherwise, it’s not creative, right?”
And so the story this show tells is of retrospection, yearning, arrivals and departures.
One of the exhibits, a piece called Somewhere in Time, is a suitcase made of rattan, like the luggage of those who arrived in 1950s Hong Kong from mainland China. The immigrants brought their rattan craftsmanship with them, created an industry, then saw it wither in the face of mass production.
“People are moving to different countries these days,” says Cecilia Lai, who made it with Barnard Chan; the pair co-founded Breakthrough Art Studio, which specialises in fibre arts and weaving. “We want to change the size from the old days and make it a modern suitcase.”
The fabric lining inside has been dyed indigo, while its pattern echoes the mosaic tiles of Hong Kong’s old buildings.
In Bon Voyage, two model-sized junks have sails made of glass and brass by Master Liu Wing-sheung. He’s now 80 and has been metal-casting for more than 60 years.
He based the sails’ shape on fallen leaves he’d gathered from a riverbank near his studio. A pair of young artisans – Jacky Lam, who specialises in lacquer, and Fanson Lam, who is Liu’s apprentice – made the bases from acacia wood.
“Acacia is non-native,” they say, explaining that it was brought from Taiwan to Hong Kong by the British colonial government. The short-lived tree is used extensively to stabilise slopes, but is gradually being replaced by longer-lasting species.
The two Lams also made Back To The Future. Its theme is school memories: in two table-top sculptures, masked students are contained – or constrained – within faux Ming-dynasty screens. These are a deliberate visual reference to the table-top dividers that became so familiar in Hong Kong’s Covid-era restaurants.
Nearby is the rooster sign from Yau Ma Tei’s old Kai Kee Mahjong parlour, Hong Kong’s first. Its glass tubes were empty of neon gas – “exhausted” is the term - but Master Wu Chi-kai, one of the last neon craftsmen in the city, has revived its glow.
Just by the doorway, whether you’re coming or going, there is A Blessing: a bamboo steamer with Lantau’s Big Buddha - in miniature - perched on top. It is a fantastically meticulous collaboration between Master Lui Ming and Inkgo Lam. At the press launch, Lui, now 93, rests his working hands on top of his umbrella and listens, smiling, to Lam, who graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2014.
Lam has already created bamboo steamers featuring London’s Big Ben and the Clock Tower in Hong Kong’s Tsim Sha Tsui area.
“It is the luckiest break in my career to work with Master Lui,” she says. “For us, Big Buddha shows the steamer craftsmanship and it represents Hong Kong.”
Hearts & Hands: Crafts of Hong Kong continues at Crafts on Peel, 11 Peel Street, Central until March 25. Tel: 2510 0637
