Hong Kong has attracted numberless photographers to record something of the life of its ordinary people. These photographers - both local and from elsewhere - have had some success in doing so. But Hong Kong’s painters and some from abroad have had very little success in attempting the same task. Only a few of them been able to tackle the problems of painting the architectural look of the city (which has been quite well achieved by photographers), and they have rather seldom attempted to paint the more human, the more intimate appearance of the city’s ordinary inhabitants going about their normal lives.
This seems rather odd. Most large cities in the world have had their life portrayed in many ways by their own and other painters. Even tiny Macau just across the water from Hong Kong had ( in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) many Chinese artists painting it and life there, as well as in Guangzhou, for the benefit of foreigners in those days before the camera came to China. Ordinary life there has been fixed, like the insect in the proverbial amber, for us by them, and by the English painter George Chinnery who lived in Macau for the last decades of his life. He, of course, had little or no access to the privacy of Chinese family homes. But at the same period in Japan almost every aspect of common life was being displayed in the woodblock prints of the ukiyo-e artists, and as a result we have a very complete knowledge of what ordinary (and other) life looked like in Japan at that time - its bathhouses, its brothels, family life, its styles of dress for men and women and children, its boatmen, the crowds passing over the bridges of the cities or on their way in the open country.
To a very small extent Hong Kong had something of its past life recorded, mostly by foreigners. But their record is nothing like so full as that of the artists in Macau. Foreigners had to see the Chinese in the open, seldom in the seclusion of their homes - so that intimate element of Chinese living is largely missing.
Doubtless, at least in part, this neglect by Chinese artists has something to do with the traditional Chinese brilliant concentration in painting on the subject of landscape. Through landscape they tried in broad terms to show an idealised setting for human life : landscape was in some ways thought of as a metaphor, its grandeur, its immensity beneath the skies seemed something to be portrayed as capable of leading the Chinese people’s thoughts and aspirations toward desirable things. People, when they were portrayed at all in those carefully constructed landscapes, existed as minimal events in the overwhelming setting. There is little in the whole gamut of traditional Chinese painting ( aside from ancestral portraits, and of course cartoons which by their nature distort reality ) of more ordinary family or daily life.
These thoughts spring to my mind, jumping out into the present from memories as I contemplate the portfolio of lithographs by the young Chinese artist Ng Ching-wa. For in these pictures, she not only catches the look of what ordinary Chinese life is like in its everyday incidents common to everyday people, but catches, too, the essence of the city and the physical closeness of its over six million people, all busy about their multifarious projects within its complex structure.
The cold months in Hong Kong are usually fewer than the hot ones; so in a physical sense Hong Kong’s life is more open to actual view than that in cooler places. Despite the Chinese painters’ love affair with landscape painting, it still surprises me that they have never found ordinary life, family life, working life the rich subjects which they undoubtedly are. In the work of Ng Ching-wa this large area of life is studied and set down for us to see and to enjoy aesthetically.
To discover a parallel in art I find myself thinking of the English writer Charles Dickens, the novelist (almost contemporary with George Chinnery the painter in Macau) who wrote about the ordinary city folk of his times. There is a parallel in some of his people and their lives with that of Chinese life today among the mass of people. Regardless of time and place, art is life’s interpreter for us. In the right hands it is capable of decoding life’s confusing language of myriad gestures, faces, attitudes, relationships, and comes up with meaning from the apparent randomness of what the eye sees. Art in its way is like the ideal dictionary; it can tell us the significance of the facts, but also much more - about the span, the whole intricate web or set of intercommunications of action and its setting, both physical and psychological.
There is more than a little of this decoding in the lithographs of this artist. Her images form an affectionate portrait of Hong Kong and its people, how they live within its unique mingling of the ultramodern and the stumbling and often crumbling old of Chinese existence and reaction. An affectionate composite picture this series of lithographs is, and happily unromantic. The facts are there, set down in a direct manner, without cynicism, without the tinted lenses of invention. And with something much rarer - the astute ability to get inside Hong Kong Chinese life and to set something of it down with feeling. In her perhaps at first rather strange way the artist is able to utilise the decoding aspect of line and design and colour, and to achieve a memorable composite picture of Hong Kong life - mostly Hong Kong ordinary life. There is little of the rich, perhaps because she is not at all familiar with that aspect. There is one image of a private swimming pool located apparently high on the Peak, its inviting water separated from a strip of downtown Hong Kong far below which takes up no more than a quarter of the frame.
The past mingles with the present. In the two storeys of an old colonial-style house rows of pupils are bent over desks in the cramped rooms of the kind of pre-war Chinese school taught by a single teacher. In another scene a tram trundles along past a narrow cross-street filled with rickshaws and other traffic between the colonnaded buildings all but vanished now from the city. But there are other views of Chinese families through the open windows on hot evenings, playing mahjong, sitting on balconies hung with caged birds in the cooler air. There’s Night in the Park with a seated young couple in the dark empty spaces with the town’s highrise burning with coloured light in the distance.
The Peak tram rises diagonally, filled with tourists, past windows where people are drinking tea, playing the piano, interspersed with potted houseplants and wedges of distant other skyscapers. There is a scene of night racing at Happy Valley, the green oval of the course where the horses and bent-down jockeys are flying past domestic scenes in neighbouring houses. And in another guise the same sort of scene involves the speeding Light Rail Transport flashing by domestic interiors and bits of momentary countryside. There’s a wonderfully done scene in a brothel, worthy of Toulouse-Lautrec but quite unlike his style.
Born in Guangzhou 27 years ago, Ng Ching-wa is still a young woman. The promise which this series of lithographs holds for the future is indeed considerable, just as its present achievement is memorable, near to the heart of the strange city of Hong Kong. Her work deals in a more intimate and meaningful way with ordinary life than any I can recall seeing in other Hong Kong contemporary artists, and amid the strident offerings of today’s art world, offers a small, precious and truthful insight denied to us by much other work.
