I picked the theme " Shanghai tan”
for my research. In this series, Chow Chun Fai shows the city outlook via
the movie scenes. A group of previously unreleased canvases
feature scenes taken from movies that portray or evoke the city of Shanghai. Shanghai,
as the cinematic source of China, developed rapidly during that period of
time. What Chow looks for is how Shanghai appears in the Hong Kong movie
scenes. From the scene to discover whether the lines can show the
Chinese's self-perception.
Chow chose enamel paint on canvas to do this
series.Contaminating pictorial and
cinematic languages, Chow Chun Fai, after having extracted a still from the
movie, applies a dense, coagulated materia with a vigorous gesture. He froze
the film, used different scenes and dialogues to express his emotions. The
exchange of dialogue among actors is broken into fragments that represent the
thematic and auditory essence of the scene. These highly ironic phrases, always
endowed with subtle and conceptual twists, consituting a key to reading the
images that they accompany. The color of the pictures is usually dim and
heavy in order to emphasize on the sense of history.
- the cultural and social background of the art
work
Even though Hong
Kong has been returned to China for decades, Hong Kong people's sense of
belonging was a bit weak somehow. From Chow's other art work, lots of the
substitles in the film clips are related to a particular theme--identity. in
this series, Chow moved his focus from Hong Kong identity to Shanghai identity.
Shanghai, though unlike Hong Kong, hasn't been seperated from the mainland but
still was a bit more westernized than other cities in China. From the
substitles, some related words occur, such as 'identity', 'Shanghainese' and
'Chinese' etc. And this historical problem becomes the social background of the
paintings.
I do agree with Nicole that the art work of Chow Chun Fai mostly focus on the identity as HongKongese, Shanghainese or Chinese. The scenes he chose from the movie, most of them in that series which was chosen by Nicole in her research just reflected how foreigners look at Shanghainese, how people who came to Shanghai from other places felt about this city and the characteristics of Shanghai as a city which was colonized before and thus bearing some kind of western features.
回复删除I would like to comment this artist’s works as very creative and profound. Hong Kong, used to be a colony belonging to Britain, so as Shanghai, which was also occupied by western countries and now is developing very well as well as keeping some kind of western traits. Residents in the two places seem to be really proud of their hometowns and their identity as the citizens in the two places is very strong. So how they look at themselves and how others look at the cities as well as how the history imposes such an effect are really interesting topics and also arouse people to think about our sense of identity.
此评论已被作者删除。
回复删除Though I am not a Shanghainese, I understand they would have their own identity preference rather than just officially being a Chinese because I feel the same as a Hong Kong citizen and I have been to Shanghai few years ago and have this observation. Chow has taken this phenomenon as the theme and he has done it in a very interesting way. Not only the subtitle he captured from the film, but the scene he painted also expresses this theme. Moreover, it is fun to look at the still screenplay from his painting when the characters are so irritated and seriously arguing. The vivid scene and the deep, inspiring subtle together have built up a very interesting contrast. I appreciate that you have spotted that he uses the dim and heavy colour to emphasize on the sense of history which I didn’t notice before. Keep up the good work.
回复删除