Art and Place: Essays on Art From a Hong Kong Perspective

15. The Art of Chan Chi-ling

The Art of Chan Chi-ling This essay was written in the spring of 1994, for the catalogue of Annie Chan's one-woman show Paintings From the Engine Room, held at the Swire School of Design. In the summer of 1994 Annie left for England, joining the increasingly lengthening list ofartists who have emigrated from Hong Kong in recent years. Like those of most other artists, the works of Chan Chi-ling display a great deal of variety. There is, however, one sense in which her images show a remarkable consistency from her student days to the present, and that is in the manner in which they are begun. Almost all her images arise from an encounter with a particular place, and usually too a place in which there is some architectural structure to be found. Her initial visual response to that place, whether it be familiar or not, will commonly take the form of a series of photographs and on-site sketches. These, in due course, will become the reference materials used for the larger images which constitute the main aspect of her production. Such images will not necessarily follow the details of the motif slavishly: a less neutral, more foregrounded, stylistic vocabulary begins to come into play at this point, and the imagination starts to work on the source material and invest it with personal significance. Despite this process of turning records of a place into selfsufficient visual images, however, there is often an attempt in this early phase of working on the larger pieces to mark out some relatively coherent spatial arena. This space may be distorted to introduce a heightened emotional tone into the work, but the distortion is likely to take the form of an exaggeration of perspectival 109 Hong Kong An Figure 15.1 Annie Chan, The Sink, 1988. Photo counesy the anist. 11. recession rather than the fragmentation or abandonment of its codes so often encountered in modernist art. Such an effect is found in The Sink (1988; fig. :l S.1), where rushing floorboard lines are invented to declaim a space in front of the humble fining mentioned in the title, which has taken on the aura of an altar within rhe charged emotional world of rhe painting. In The Corridor (1988) an even deeper space is carved out, and the tunnelling effect found in that work can also be seen in a monoprint depicting a New York subway scene produced as early as 1984. In bOth the works mentioned so far line is a dominant visual element, being created with the help of a variety of media. Livestock markers, a type of large paintstick, are one of Chan's most distinctive tools, but smaller Caran D'Ache wax crayons are also often responsible for the drawn elements which tend to intermingle with painted marks in her characteristically mixed-media works. So far I have concentrated on the role of these lines in creating the spatial structures of Chan's works, but they can also have an independent life of their own, escaping servitude to descriptive tasks and taking on a more directly expressive function. The agitated mood these lines introduce makes one think of the artists of the Expressionistic tradition, and particularly of that recent and most self-conscious representative of it, Anselm Kiefer, who might also come to mind because of his use of sharp spatial recessions and his interest in architectural spaces. The scribbled lines of Cy Twombly - another artist that Chan admires - should also be considered a possible visual source for her linear vocabulary: it is not unusual for Chan to find inspiration from artists whose work is in most respects quite different in direction from her own. Among the visual sources for her recent work, for instance, are Frank Stella and David Hockney. On occasion the lines in Chan's works are not content to provide an expressive overlay or counterpoint to the architectural frame, and they coalesce into distinct foreground forms. One sees this in Actions on Stage (1991), where a kind of tornado form occupies the foreground space to the left side of the image. These foreground forms (which generally seem more abstract in nature than their surroundings) appear in many images, and one can talk in fact of a second phase to Chan's working process in these cases. The more familiar world of the architectural space is overlaid by (complicated...