In front of me is a painting that evokes a spectrum of blues and a white haze, exhibited at Art Central for Hong Kong Art Week. It is by local artist Po Hsun Huang, and it is titled Fragments of Golden Times.
I might think that those cosmic mushrooms carry something of hundun (混沌) or the confusion that arises before paradise in Chinese mythology. Also, that this marvelous chaos is what we call Hong Kong.
A Second in Hong Kong
While you play a console game on another continent and someone names a volcano on the moon, this painting speaks to me of everything that is happening at the same time, everywhere, in Hong Kong.
There is a woman eating buttered toast and drinking jasmine tea in a cha chaan teng, that quintessential Hong Kong cafe that demonstrates the fusion between East and West. A city that greets the future with its fragmented, hybrid will. It also has something of watercolor, as an escape from a gray world.
Perhaps someone is eating the same delicious pork and shrimp bun from last night. Two young people play on a basketball court in Choi Hung Estate, or the “Rainbow Estate,” whose instagrammable aesthetics sometimes eclipse the history of the many neighbors who were moved to this social housing complex after a serious fire in the 1960s.
