Notes
Chinese Art and Its Encounter with the World 206 Since Hollywood is so strongly associated with film making, Chan’s ! towards that location which was a feature of Hong Kong cinema during this post-1997 era (with such results as John Woo’s Face Off of 1997). Tong Tong, a mainland Chinese prostitute and the main female character in Hollywood Hong Kong, dreams of going to America and eventually locations mentioned in its title. This departure for America echoes that of the Faye Wong character at the end of Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express (1994), which makes a play between a Hong Kong restaurant named ‘California’ and the American state of the same name (referenced also in the soundtrack via the song ‘California Dreaming’). Amongst visual artists to look at Hong Kong in relation to other cities is Warren Leung Chi-wo, whose photographic images of urban skyscapes have featured the city but also others he has lived in or visited such as New York, Venice or Shanghai (for example, Chambers, 1999). By focusing on the sky, or rather the silhouette of the sky as framed by a city’s architecture viewed from below, Leung finds an aspect that links all cities together. Although different cities may have different characteristic silhouettes, the sky at least is something they all have in common. This may lead one to see a continuity between works of this kind made in Hong Kong and those made elsewhere, but the relationship between the cities he images can even be inscribed within the images themselves. One of his New York works, Frank Lin meets Broad Wai of 1999 (see Figure 121), for instance, makes punning connections between actual street names denoting an intersection in Lower Manhattan (represented through four different silhouettes captured in photos taken in different directions from the same location) and fabricated equivalents of the kind of English personal names of Chinese people one might encounter in Hong Kong. In Crossing Sky of 2001 (see Figure 122) there is a different and more explicit kind of entanglement or cross-infection between cities: here the skyline is a fabricated hybrid, including elements of both Hong Kong and Venetian architecture to produce the silhouette. This silhouette was also used as a template for constructing a chandelier and for baking shaped cookies, which were part ;* Q `! O’Connell as ‘Huang Yadong’ (see Yingguo yu Shijie, 230–31 and 383–84), although the documentary information which enables this identification is not stated. In her catalogue entry ?* Surgeons of England portrait as of Wang. 54. There are three Reynolds images of Wang-Y-Tong: see Algernon Graves and William Vine Cronin, A History of the Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Vol. III (London: Henry Graves and Co, 1899–1901), 1028–29. One of the three portraits is erroneously described by Graves and Cronin as being of Chitqua (Wang-y-tong or Tanchequa). There is also confusion at one point in Whitley’s papers: he erroneously states that a now-untraceable painting by Serres of ‘Loum Kiqua’, another earlier Chinese visitor to London (known through a print by Thomas Burford), is of Chitqua. Through his association with Knole, Sevenoaks, the home of George Frederick Sackville, third Duke of Dorset, Wang-Y-Tong was also to appear in a working drawing by Thomas ! * + exhibited 1782, now in the Tate collection). 55. The collection as it now stands (it entered the possession of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1799, after Hunter’s death) contains for example such paintings as A Labrador Woman (1773, artist unknown) and Omai (William Hodges). Some items of less relevance to Hunter’s collection were sold in 1794, and paintings were also added to the collection after his time. 56. A manuscript list of 1816 entitled ‘A List of Paintings and Drawings framed and glazed, numbered according to the Situation in which they were placed round the rail of the gallery in Mr. Hunter’s museum in Castle Street Leicester Square’ is referred to in documentation held in the archives of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, which lists ‘Portrait of a Chinese Mandarin’ as No. 27, indicating that the image of Chitqua was indeed displayed in Hunter’s gallery. 57. See John Sunderland, John Hamilton Mortimer, His Life and Works (printed for The Walpole Society by W. S. Maney and Son as Vol. 52, 1988), 142. The Chitqua portrait is reproduced as Plate 95, and dated to 1771. It is given as in a...
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