Created By
Wai Hong
Ink and color on golden Xuan paper on board
Curator
Luke Chapman
This piece from HONG Wai's "Hong Kong Express" series serves as a poignant homage to Anita Mui's iconic stage costumes of 1987, a pivotal year in Hong Kong's pop cultural history. The dress, rendered with both precision and fluidity, captures the essence of Mui's legendary performances and her boundary-pushing fashion choices. HONG's masterful manipulation of traditional Chinese ink techniques transforms this costume study into a meditation on transformation and cultural identity. The work represents a sophisticated dialogue between Hong Kong's golden age of entertainment and traditional Chinese artistic practices, demonstrating HONG's unique ability to bridge temporal and cultural divides through her art.
"1987 Glamour I" (2025) is a striking composition executed on golden Xuan paper that depicts a theatrical black dress rendered in traditional Chinese ink. The garment, suspended in space without a figure, features an intricately detailed bodice with a geometric pattern reminiscent of studded embellishments or sequins. The full skirt dissolves into dramatic ink drips and washes that cascade down the paper, creating a sense of movement and ethereal transformation. The work combines precise architectural detail in the structured bodice with loose, expressive brushwork in the skirt's treatment. Traditional Chinese characters and red seal marks appear at the top of the composition, while the artist's signature and seal anchor the lower left corner, connecting contemporary subject matter with classical artistic conventions.
Created By
Wai Hong
95 x 62 cm | 37 x 24 in
2025
