Yeung Hok Tak

A LONE CLOCK tower standing in a vast deserted field; a young couple relaxing at the edge of a cliff overlooking a campsite; an extraneous figure laying against an abstract forest-scape; Star Ferries cruising in a sea of lush trees – Yeung Hok Tak’s wide oeuvre of works that span over two decades are a spectrum of psychedelic colours rendered into magical and hypnotic narratives that evoke a nostalgia for his home city.

You’re known for your use of rich psychedelic colours. What do they represent?

I generally don’t think too much about the choice of colours, just try to place bright, eye- catching colours onto the canvas and let them match and collide with each other. I think one of the joys of painting is to give myself a sense of pleasure and excitement.

Since the 2000s, your art has depicted people and scenes unique to Hong Kong. The city has changed a lot in 20 years – how has this change been reflected in your work, whether in terms of aesthetics or the message you want to convey?

My work has been mostly about Hong Kong’s living environment from the past. Take my first comic book, How Blue Was My Valley (2003), for example: it’s about my memories of living in public housing estates in the 1970s. All in all, my art is not about responding to the social conditions at the time of the creation, so I haven’t managed to reflect the changes in the last 20 years. I’m always obsessed with Hong Kong from the 1950s to the 1980s.

Where do your inspirations come from? Do you begin your creative process with the message you want to convey or the image you want to paint?

Inspirations come from an intangible archive of memories. My memories are blurred, imprecise and even at times incorrect, fused with fantasy, but that’s what’s interesting. I’m afforded a space of imagination to reconstruct a scene, rendering it familiar yet different. Regarding the starting point of a creative process, I may start from a theme or an image.

You work around this theme of rediscovering fragments of memory and questioning the meaningfulness and legitimacy of historical developments and social progress. What about this theme interests you?

I can’t be very specific about the reasons for this, but this interest in history and the past has been there since I was young, and it seems to be a kind of built-in programme that I was born with. I don’t know why, but I just have a stronger feeling for things and ideas from the past, as if there’s a sense of mission that drives me to depict the past world.

You once mentioned that you have this imaginary world that you like to turn to.

About 10 or 20 years ago, I saw Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings movies and became fascinated with the narrative model of the fantasy world, so I began to use Adobe Illustrator to draw imaginary maps, constructing a fantasy world. I mapped the cities within, and projected, before I went to sleep, my consciousness into the cities in my head, allowing my vision to roam through the streets, buildings and mansions. Then I would fall asleep before knowing it. But you may say it was simply useless and meaningless because I didn’t intend to develop it into anything artistic. It was like a placebo that could relax and allow you to forget the stress of life, better than sleeping pills.

Is there an emotion you want your audience to feel or message you’d like to convey to them when they look at your work?

As I mentioned, I think it’s definitely meaningful to depict scenes from the past. Hong Kong’s society changes rapidly, the life here is also very fast-paced; there is no time for one to be concerned with things outside of his or her immediate surroundings. It’s definitely the case with the past and old objects. People casually throw away what’s no longer useful, so much so that we gradually forget everything, and can only react mechanically to people and events. We have become spiritually void and can only look optimistically forward into the future. I just know that we have to know the past before we can clearly understand the present and precisely project the future.

Why did you decide to partner with HSBC and be a part of its Metaverse Gallery?

The metaverse is an important, ongoing trend; HSBC provides a brilliant platform on which we can show our artworks, and I’m happy to be a part of it.

Was this your first time working in the digital art realm?

My first time working in the digital art realm was probably when I was making How Blue Was My Valley. I used Adobe Illustrator for it. Of course, it was only a means of expression on a flat surface and was not as interactive, virtual and holistic as the forms made available today.

What were some of your main takeaways from this project with HSBC?

That it’s possible for me to get a deep understanding of the metaverse as a new concept and form of expression. It gives me new ideas and directions for future projects.