Meli-melo artists' alliance, 5B Wallock Mansion, 219-221 Wing Lok Street, Sheung Wan. 2pm-6pm Sat-Sun, or by appointment. Tel: 9257 1937. Sept 2-17.
Forget the lonely attic room. For Betty Cheung the creative process is also a social one. It's how the gallery-cum-studio she helped found runs and it's how she best likes to do her own work.
There was a time when Taiwan-born Cheung bought a cupboard full of paints and canvases and they just sat there untouched. And then there was the moment she and the co-founders of the meli-melo artists alliance decided to hold Art Jam at midnight; sharing art, food and wine with whomever cared to drop by.
The result of such a shared creative process? Well, it's many things. One is her first solo show, which opens in the Sheung Wan gallery this month. Using life drawing, photography and abstract painting, her works (right) are ethereal, cosmic interpretations of her dreams. So what's she dreaming that's so huge in scale?
'They seem to take months to actually reveal themselves,' she laughs. 'They involve lots of amazing transitions where you are in this tremendous white building with huge ceilings - and then you end up in the slums of America. They feel like tremendous movies, though the story lines are garbled but always linked together. I use painting to express those transition from one extreme place to the next.'
Meanwhile, back on earth, Cheung, 34, is an architect of long standing who just realised last summer that her 10-year career was not enough. 'Emotionally, I was in limbo. I wanted to do something but I didn't know what,' says Cheung who started painting at the age of five.