Artist best known for realistic portrayals of Hong Kong says new paintings are all illusions
- Yeung Tong-lung’s unique mixture of humour and historical references gives us a Hong Kong that is both familiar and strange
- A solo exhibition of Yeung’s most recent works is taking place at Blindspot Gallery in Wong Chuk Hang until March 6
Yeung Tong-lung’s Hong Kong is so familiar that it is easy to assume he paints from real life. How else could the shop interiors, the urban parks, the scaffolding with green safety nets in fast-gentrifying Kennedy Town be captured so vividly?
The degree of realism is such that the reflection of a light bulb can be seen in the gold lettering of a Lunar New Year fortune scroll in a new painting. In another work, the flock of pigeons are so lifelike they are practically flying off the canvas.
But something always seems off when it comes to his figures. Often heavily foreshortened, their disproportionately large heads, wide eyes and wooden expressions give them a tragicomic air that makes it clear they are not a cliched, mawkish celebration of the quotidian and the local.
This is made more obvious in his recent works, currently being shown at Blindspot Gallery in Wong Chuk Hang.
Yeung avoids talking about his paintings explicitly, but he is eager to dispel the notion that the scenes are “real”. These paintings are crammed full of illusions, multiple perspectives and the mingling of the real and the imagined, he says. His figurative paintings, then, are less a record of an urban landscape and more a metaphor for the subjectivity of seeing.
