Yeung Tong Lung

b.1956, Fujian, China

Yeung Tong Lung (b. 1956, Fujian, China) relocated to Hong Kong in his late teens. As a self-taught artist, Yeung has a keen eye for observation, and encapsulates with great sensitivity the seemingly banal details of quotidian life in Hong Kong. Yeung creates large-scale figurative paintings within interior and exterior urban spaces. By integrating multiple vantage points within a single scene, he constructs an illusional three-dimensional space, guiding audiences in and out of his painting scenarios. In his work, reflection is a recurring motif in which he incorporates mirrored surfaces such as TV and mobile screens as well as windows, reflecting fragments of his subjects while leaving hints to hidden meanings. Yeung often portrays the overlooked and marginalized communities of Hong Kong such as immigrants, domestic workers, and refugees, revealing his humanistic perspective on art and society.

In 1990, Yeung co-founded Quart Society, one of the first independent artist-run spaces in Hong Kong featuring experimental and avant-garde art exhibitions. Solo Exhibitions of Yeung include “Daily Practice” at Blindspot Gallery (Hong Kong, 2021), “Cuts in Synchronicity: Paintings by Yeung Tong Lung” at ACO Art Space (Hong Kong, 2019), and “Just Painting” at Comix Homebase (Hong Kong, 2017). Yeung has also shown in group exhibitions including “Wan Chai Grammatica: Past, Present, Future Tense Show” at Hong Kong Arts Centre (Hong Kong, 2018), “Corner of Dialogue—You Paint, I Paint. Artistic Dialogue and Exhibition” at 1a space (Hong Kong, 2003), and “The Box Show” at Hong Kong Fringe Club (Hong Kong, 1994). Yeung’s works have been collected by M+ and the Hong Kong Museum of Art.

Publications on Yeung include Just Painting: Yeung Tong Lung (published by Art and Culture Outreach Limited, 2021) and Mute Pianos: Forty Years of Paintings by Yeung Tong Lung (co-published by University Museum and Art Gallery of the University of Hong Kong and mccm creations, 2020). Yeung Tong Lung currently lives and works in Hong Kong.

Artist CV

Artworks (15)

Yeung Tong Lung

Night Shift

Yeung Tong Lung

Kam Wa Street

Yeung Tong Lung

Sketchbook

Yeung Tong Lung

Porcelain Dog

Yeung Tong Lung

King of Siu Chao

Yeung Tong Lung

Mount Davis

Night Shift

2022

View Introduction

Yeung Tong Lung’s Night Shift (2022) is a large-scale painting depicting a neighbourhood celebrity standing in the middle of road works, overlooking the tram depot along the harbour. Sporting a punk rock hairdo dyed pink, a face mask, and a flower patterned vest, the slipper-wearing man stands resolute with his gaze fixated far beyond the frame, echoing the arrow sign on the right of the scene above the intimate sight of a kissing couple. Carrying a dashing demeanor, he stares on emanating an air of resilience and flair. Yeung portrays the less visible details of quotidian life in Hong Kong, highlighting people active in the nocturnal hours.

Close Introduction

Yeung Tong Lung

Night Shift

Kam Wa Street

2014

View Introduction

Near Shau Kei Wan tram terminus, the regular bustling market scenes of Kam Wa Street at the peak of day become deserted in the dead of night. Evocative of Edward Hopper’s solitary individuals, a lonesome character sits in a dimly lit café in the bottom left. Yeung plays with the apparent realism in his paintings with an array of perspectives, presenting new ways of looking. Using his skilful dissection and fusing of reality and imagination, he elevates the familiar banal, inducing a sober moment of illusory clarity in midnight.

Close Introduction

Yeung Tong Lung

Kam Wa Street

Sketchbook

2008-2021

View Introduction

The artist’s affinity for the extraordinariness of ordinary life is exemplified by Sketchbook (2008-2020), a sprawling installation of 33 panels, where the artist painted scenes in the park when he peeps out of the window of his Kennedy Town studio. These paintings represent a keen observation for the environment, as greenery, cityscape and people form a mosaic of lived experiences. The artist notes that in his many years peering out of the window, he has witnessed the Bauhinia tree grow from a treeling to a flowering tower providing shade for park goers. The growing bauhinia trees, the aging inhabitants, and the rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood, are the humble and vastly generative soil of Yeung’s art creation.

Close Introduction

Yeung Tong Lung

Sketchbook

Daily Practice

2020

View Introduction

Daily Practice proposes an expansive reading of Yeung’s paintings, a practice that spans four decades and myriad styles, but consistently based on an intimate observation of people, nature and things with whom the artist shares his existence. Painting for Yeung is a daily practice — a patient practice for internal and external growth, and an imaginative practice for representing the richness of interior worlds beyond surfaces and despite circumstances.

With flair and ingeniousness, Yeung tirelessly depicts the daily lives of the working class and the proletariat, giving them the larger-than-life attention and representation that they are often deprived. His paintings contain many entry points, opening multiple puncta that pierce through the fog of our mundane and desensitized existence. They hold up a poignant and personal mirror to our own lives, and reveal the blind spot of our perceivably fixed self. In Daily Practice, Yeung coaches us that the act of looking is the ultimate act of self-discovery, and the most gracious gift of compassion, optimism and hope.

Close Introduction