Yeung Tong Lung
Yeung Tong Lung was born in 1956 in Fujian, China and moved to Hong Kong in 1973. He began painting in 1975. Yeung’s works deal with both the internal and external landscapes and spaces of human being. Everyday street scenes, old buildings and homes, transportation, ordinary people, back alleys, parks or plants commonly seen in Hong Kong frequently appear in Yeung’s paintings. He plays with perspectives to construct an illusional three dimensional space, providing multiple viewpoints and subtle hints on sightline movements to guide the audience in and out of his painting scenarios.
In 1990, Yeung co-founded Quart Society, one of the first independent art spaces in Hong Kong. Solo Exhibitions of Yeung include “Cuts in Synchronicity: Paintings by Yeung Tong Lung” (ACO Art Space, Hong Kong, 2019); “Just Painting” (Comix Homebase, Hong Kong, 2017). He has also shown in group exhibitions including “Wan Chai Grammatica: Past, Present, Future Tense Show” (Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong, 2018); “Corner of Dialogue—You Paint, I Paint. Artistic Dialogue and Exhibition” (1a space, Hong Kong, 2003); and “The Box Show” (Hong Kong Fringe Club, Hong Kong, 1994) . His works have also been collected by the Hong Kong Art Museum and M+ Museum for Visual Culture.
Yeung Tong Lung currently lives and works in Hong Kong.
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Kam Wa Street / 2014
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.
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Sketchbook / 2008-2021
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.
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Daily Practice / 2020
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.
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