Hong Kong artist Hon Chi-fun’s fascination with light explored in new show
- Over 30 works of the Hong Kong modernist artist, who recently died at the age of 96, are on show at the Asia Society Hong Kong Centre
- Exhibition is a rare chance to see some of his best works all under one roof
Bath of Fire (1968) is the first work you see in the exhibition. The dramatic red and green tryptich was collected by the Hong Kong Museum of Art soon after it was shown at the City Hall in 1968 in one of the most significant group shows of Hong Kong avant-garde art of the time.
It features a number of key ideas that fascinated Hon for all his life: the clashing of personal memories against official history, new ways of using and combining materials and techniques (in this case, painting and screen printing), and the modern expression of traditional culture.
Secret Codes (1974) is one of his signature airbrush paintings he referred to as “distilled desires”. A white sun in the middle is breaking through a thick, grey haze, its halo faintly visible. He made this when he was 52 and in the midst of wooing his former student, the artist Choi Yan-chi, who had just moved to the Art Institute of Chicago and who would marry him in Carson City, Nevada, two years later. Choi says Hon was particularly proud of the fact that he achieved that grey without using any black at all, as you’d notice if you peered closely at the spray.
Similarly suffused with light and intimacy is Karma Focus (1971), a purplish work with a small dot in the middle. It is a woman’s breast.
Hon was one of seven founders of the Circle Art Group in 1964, as local artists looked for ways to meld traditional ink culture with contemporary influences coming in from the West. They did not all paint circles. The name implies an association with Chinese philosophies rather than the shape.
