FAAS5039 Graduation Workshop – Submission of Theoretical Text (Artist Statement)

for the Oral Examination

LEE Kwun-leung Vincent (Student No.: 1007070165)

Topic: “Lifeguards’ Journey within Kowloon Walled City”

Whenever feeling confused with what sort of creative theme I can research, it is
better to start with experimental linear drawings in a nonchalant manner first. An
artist from the UK, called Paul Ryan, is keen at manifesting the double-spread pages
of a sketchbook to convey both a rational idea on the left-hand side and a
sentimental idea on the right-hand side. Same as how Prof. Paul Coldwell from the
University of the Arts London described “Paul imitates the spontaneity that is
associated with the idea of the sketchbook and particularly the direct unedited nature
of sketchbook drawings”1, I can thus learn from Paul Ryan to simply focus on the
clumsy fabrication of lines with regards to his case of sentimental page on the
right-hand side of the sketchbook without an awareness on spatial distributions and
reservation of voidness. Paul Ryan uses to jot down manuscripts on the left page,
and plays with either life drawings or linear drawings on the right page. Now, I make
good use of his right-page theory to develop “Definition of Strokes” series, “Forces
from Nature” series, “Confusion of electrical power released from the digital world”
series, “Celebrative energies from circuses, amusement parks and concerts” series
and “Forces from the decaying of natural substances in deep autumn” series.

“Definition of Strokes” series

1
Curated by Professors Paul Coldwell and Stephen Farming, “Drawing: Interpretation / Translation”
Pp. 12-13. The United Kingdom: CCW Graduate School at University of Arts London, 2011 {Introducing
the work – by Paul Coldwell, Professor of Fine Art at Camberwell Chelsea Wimbledon, University of
the Arts of London}

1
After an imitation on Paul Ryan’s linear-dragging methodology, I moved on to Wolf
Stubbe’s avocation for developing four oil-pastel drawings based on his four notions
of “immaterial qualities”, namely “slackness”, “tenseness”, “denseness” and
“diffuseness”2. My way of expressing “slackness” was to portray the illusion of a
swamp with fragmented bushes showing a sense of tranquility. For “tenseness”, I
placed the two shells of the two snails inside the dark forest with waterfall nearby.
“Denseness” made me recall the interlacing patterns of “hair language” from Dr.
LEUNG Mee-ping’s installation art which were blown to shiver within the autumn
breezes, whereas the corresponding structuralism of the lines shared similarities with
the musical rhythms of Wassily Kendinsky’s paintings. The “diffuseness” was about a
radioactivity of nuclear forces from the Heaven within the deserted flatland.

Slackness (Oil Pastel on Paper, A4 size)

2
Written by Wolf Stubbe and Translated from the German by Richard Waterhouse, “History of
Modern Graphic Art” Pp. 211. The United Kingdom: Thames and Hudson – London, Translated Edition
in 1963 {Structuralism and Automatism – New objective references and figuration}

2
Tenseness (Oil Pastel on Paper, A4 Size)

Denseness (Oil Pastel on Paper, A4 Size)

3
 Diffuseness (Oil Pastel on Paper, A4 Size)

These four advanced experimental drawings, with no design-thinking considerations

in composition-making, guided me to rediscover a “primary phenomena of vision”3
from my subconscious mind. My “primary phenomena of vision” is Kowloon Walled
City. I actually thought about the restoration of unplanned architectural fantasy from
this demolished slum, as I could hide myself inside the mini shops of different
corners within this pseudo-castle where I could disclose the most evil sides of my
unknown personality for immediate entertainments. Kowloon Walled City is a
dreamland for me to escape from the secular judgments and institutional restraints
by the regime concerning a request on my endless accomplishment of meritocracy
and upward mobility.

3
Same as above, Pp. 204 {“Concrete” art and autonomous graphic art}
(* Only now, as this idea was adapted in modern art, a “spirit-form” confronts the nature-form. If one
called this spirit-form “abstract”, it meant that one was still linking it too closely with the nature-form
from which it had been abstracted. What seemed important was, on the contrary, to affirm the
absolute polarity of spirit- and nature-form and to insist that the spirit-form wrongly called “abstract”
is just as “real” as concrete form. This is why Theo van Doesburg’s manifesto of 1930 contains, and it is
an extremely pithy remark, the proposition: “…… nothing is more concrete, more real than a line, a
colour, a surface.” Since concrete art was thus conceived as a human world of expression, it had a
natural correlation with the foundations of human experience, and the question was therefore
inevitably raised of whether fixed relations exist between specific pure form- and colour-elements and
specific contents within the broad compass of what could be experienced. Psychological research
endeavoured to establish “primary phenomena of vision”, and finally concluded that a particular
experiential content could not be clearly associated with particular “concrete” forms and colours,
though, to be sure, the expressive scope of given “concrete” forms proved wholly circumscribed and
did not get lost in vagueness.)

4
 Kowloon Walled City (Oil Pastel on Paper, A4 size)

ANARCHIC URBANISM SERIES

“Fruit punch” is not a must for being labeled as “kitsch art”. It can be a quality kind of
fine arts if judging from the aspect of genre painting with a strong emphasis on
narration. Even for Su Hanchen (蘇漢臣)’s court painting called “Hundred Baby Sons
Being Playful In Spring” (百子戲春圖) inside the Hanlin Painting Academy of
Northern Song Dynasty, Su could hardly employ concreted baby sons from the
Homecoming Dads within the civic strata for serving as life-drawing models or strictly
imitate the drawing-methodology references from the “Xuanhe Painting Catalogue”.
Su Hanchen still needed to trust his intuition for imagining the images of the baby
sons and portray them out as similar as a dictation on the facial features and
gestures of cartoon characters nowadays. What was more, the entire vision of Su’s
court painting here did not include a reservation of voidness as an accomplishment
of “proper spatial distribution” (經營位置) ideal based on Xie He’s “Six Rules”, as the
prior emphasis went to the “portraying the essence based on the concreted form”
(以形寫神) mission in accordance with Gu Kaizhi’s avocation about gongbi figurative
art. Celia Tinyan KO, a local oil-painting artist focusing on figurative art, encouraged
me to courageously outline the story figures to be as cute as possible for expressing
the beauty of “indigenous bangers” (土炮) even though 90% of her art creations are
commissioned portraits with a mixture between Pop Art and Photorealism.

5
The representation of anarchic urbanism with sociability in Kowloon Walled City is
nothing different from either “The Foolish Old Man Removing Mountain Barriers” ink
painting by Xu Beihong or “The Upper-River Coastal Episode of Ching Ming Festival”
court painting by Zhang Zeduan. Michel Foucault described Kowloon Walled City as a
“carceral city”, in which there is no centralized moral ruler / moral leader / main
character for cored thematic expression and there is no need for feeling regretted
with the emotional manner of portraying the liberal figurative interactions in a
clumsy manner:

Foucault offers a brief sketch of what he terms the ‘carceral city’. Building on
previous depictions of carcerality as a ‘net’ or ‘network’ (Foucault 1991:
299–300), the ‘carceral city’ denotes a coextensive web of disciplinary
technologies through which citizens are shaped and surveilled. As with the
later notions of governmentality and biopower, power is not concentrated
centrally but diffused through institutions and the body politic. As Foucault
notes, in the carceral city ‘there is, not the “centre of power“, not a network
of forces, but a multiple network of diverse elements — walls, space,
institutions, rules, discourse’ (Foucault 1991: 307). For Foucault, the
disciplinary technologies developed in the prison — involving strict regulation
of time, space and human interaction — were also writ large in the urban
fabric. The result is that there is no ‘outside’, just an ‘inside’ to the disciplinary
system (Foucault 1991: 301). The ‘carceral city’ is, therefore, a concretized
instance of the disciplined society, in bricks and mortar, and provides an
image for the power of ‘normalisation’ of the carceral in urban space.4

If following Michel Foucault’s “carceral city” theory to paint, I can thus portray the
lifeguards to be very egocentric for impulsively pursuing what they want to be
entertained in accordance with an influx of their lusts, whereas each character within
the lifeguard community can achieve self-sufficiency in this trapped but emancipated
realm of “enclave”. There is no need for considering the idea of consistency from
lifeguards’ actions and some rooms for self-reflections, whereas a piece of painting
can be without any focal point stressed by the Renaissance painters. Narration and
design-thinking cannot coexist once the burden of “centrality” is put aside.

4
Alistair Fraser and Anna Schliehe, "THE CARCERAL CITY: CONFINEMENT AND ORDER IN HONG
KONG'S FORBIDDEN ENCLAVE", "The British Journal of Criminology (2021) 61" (Advance Access
publication on 5 January 2021), Pp. 591

6
 “Lifeguards at Nudity Pub”, Acrylic on Canvas, 24” x 36”

Left: “Lifeguards Enjoying Sauna at Kwong Ming Road”, Acrylic on Canvas, 24” x 36”
Right: “Lifeguards enjoying spa at Kwong Ming Road”, Acrylic on Canvas, 24” x 36”

7
LOVE NOURISHMENT & HOMECOMING DAD SERIES

The two photographic artworks from the “City of Darkness” catalogue of Greg Girard
correspond with the episodes of “Homecoming Dad” (暖男爸爸) movie on ViuTV
Channel, in which a cute little son helped his father look after the snack store inside
the dark lane of Kowloon Walled City. The little son experienced an earlier
maturation of his personality as he clearly knew that he is from an impoverished
family background and he feels satisfied with what his father has given him to his
childhood. Actually, a slum like Kowloon Walled City can reversely generate a truthful
kind of love nourishment and family happiness. An over-institutionalized social
mechanism stressing an unlimited pressure on a particular young talent’s possibility
in pursuing extreme elitism and upward mobility might undermine a teenager /
youngster’s opportunity in dating with a pretty girl and giving birth of a filial son.
Amy Cheung Siu-han (張小嫻) indicated that a long-term insufficiency of love and
romance would cause a lack of “dopamine” in the body system of human being5,
which would undermine one’s motivation in surviving with confidence even though
he / she can nearly seize the point of secular achievement and the consequential
disaster will be as similar as a sudden break-drown in vehicle driving. Just like Ms.
Lau Sin Peng (劉羨冰) from Macao6, she is a very industrious and committed scholar
with lots of public-service titles and awards, such as issuing a prominent research
publication called “A History of Education in Macao”. But, Ms. Lau Sin Peng now
remains as an old virgin lady without any sorts of “dopamine”. Even though her
contributions earn the deep respects from the patriotic sectors of Macao political
community with regards to her re-integration of local heritages and her devotion to
the stable transformation of “One Country, Two Systems”, she fails to deserve the
nourishments of love despite of sacrifices for national prosperity at the expense of
her personal marriage interests and she can hardly find a hidden corner for enjoying
5
Amy CHEUNG Siu-han (張小嫻), “Please fall in love with a man who is at least as similar as a man
with commitment” (請你至少愛一個像男人的男人) Pp. 97 & 101. Hong Kong: Crown Publishing
st
(H.K.) Ltd., 1 Edition in September 2017 {How come our love and romance will change from
prosperity to decline? (我們的愛情，為甚麼盛極而衰？)}
6
Ms. Lau Sin Peng (劉羨冰), born in China in 1934, has dedicated herself to a teaching profession
lasting 48 years. In 1984 she became Principal of Seong Fan Evening School, affiliated to Macao
Chamber of Commerce, until her retirement in 2000. Lau obtained her Med from South China Normal
University in 1993. As an active member of the community, Lau served a number of organizations. She
chaired the Board of Directors of the Macao Chinese Educators’ Association (MCEA) from 1994 to
1998. She was a member of Preparatory Committee for Macao Special Administrative Region. She is
now Vice-President of the MCEA, member of the Macao Education Commission, and board member
of History of Education, China Education Society. In 1990 the former governor of Macao awarded Lau
the Medal of Merit-Culture for her outstanding achievements and again in 2002, the Macao SAR
government awarded her the Medal of Merit-Education for her remarkable contributions to Macao. {*
quoted from the “About the Author” session of her prominent publication “A History of Education in
Macao”}

8
sexual leisure with horny men in Taipa or Coloane due to her special identity as a
celebrity within this tiny RAEM community.

Being a Homecoming Dad cannot depart from the consideration of finding

trustworthy rooms for sexual leisure. The Kowloon Walled City is actually a
trustworthy shelter without interventions and exploitations from British authority,
PRC authority, Hong Kong Government authority, social elites, property developers,
privileged leaders from educational field, moral talibans from religious communities,
legal experts and bureaucrats. A lifeguard being resettled inside the an unplanned
and anarchic slum like the Kowloon Walled City for enjoying wet kiss with a
bikini-dressed girl inside a fishball factory does not need to be accountable to the
expectations of his relatives which is as similar as the episodes of “Clan Honour” (家
族榮耀) movie on TVB JADE Channel that any sorts of dating relationships no matter
with contributions or nuisances outside must undergo an accountability to the
entrepreneurial reputation of Ma’s Clan. Just like Gaetano Manfredonia and Francis
Ronsin implied, the leftards would usually uphold “anarchic urbanism” similar to the
enclave module of Kowloon Walled City to justify their egocentric desires on
“anarchism for revolutionary sexualism” in accordance with E. Armand’s avocation:

“The camaraderie amoureuse thesis,” he (E. Armand) explained, “entails a

free contract of association (that may be annulled without notice, following
prior agreement) reached between anarchist individualists of different
genders, adhering to the necessary standards of sexual hygiene, with a
view toward protecting the other parties to the contract from certain risks
of the amorous experience, such as rejection, rupture, exclusivism,
possessiveness, unicity, coquetry, whims, indifference, flirtatiousness,
disregard for others, and prostitution.” 7

Hong Kong people use to be very selfish and emotionless, in which even though your
social contributions and career achievements are as influential as Ms. Lau Sin Peng in
Macao, you cannot gain their compassion for being granted a companion in terms of
lacking “dopamine”. The well-structured luxurious residences and expensive hotel
infrastructures in the directly-administered territory of Hong Kong outside Kowloon
Walled City even discourage the poor teenagers / youngsters to enjoy in sexual

7
Gaetano Manfredonia from Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris & Francis Ronsin from Université de
Dijon, “E. Armand and 'la camaraderie amoureuse' - Revolutionary sexualism and the struggle
against jealousy”, Organized by International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam: "Free Love and
the Labour Movement" second workshop in the series "Socialism and Sexuality" (Pp. 3) Amsterdam: 6
October 2000 {1. The establishment of l’en dehors and the campaign for revolutionary sexualism}

9
intercourses in spacious domestic environments, as the most rewarding excitements
in sex would usually be found from the Tong Lau buildings. So, for these three
paintings, I absorbed inspirations from Greg Girard’s photographic artworks from his
“City of Darkness” catalogue and Pak Sheung Chuen’s happening art with his son to
represent how a lifeguard can be fully emancipated in terms of flirting a pretty
companion and raising a cute son in a low-profile lifestyle at Kowloon Walled City.

“Homecoming Dad along West Side Street”, Acrylic on Canvas, 24” x 30”

Left: “Lifeguard's Love Nourishment inside a Fishball Factory”, Acrylic on Canvas,

24” x 36”
Right: “Homecoming Dad from the Ancient Cannon”, Acrylic on Canvas, 36” x 24”

10
SOCIAL SERVICE SERIES

Even though the Kowloon Walled City was a Chinese enclave disliked by the British
rulers, it attracted Caucasian foreigners and Japanese to conduct field-trip studies for
its architectural fantasies before its demolition. Local Hong Kong movies reaching the
international level of Hollywood theatrical charisma use to set prominent television,
movie and pop stars to cast for the martial-art and triad-related episodes. The mini
shops at Lung Chun Road, West Side Street, Kwong Ming Road and Dentist Street
provide lots of imaginative rooms for screenwriters to think about what sorts of
proletariat stories they can impose to. Just like how Alistair Fraser and Eva Cheuk-yin
Li described, there is no need for a reconstruction of a concreted Walled City and a
re-composition of a virtual space based on our collective memories on the Kowloon
Walled City can definitely satisfy audiences’ desires for a temporary spiritual
withdrawal from the cruel reality of secular judgments and keen social competitions
through allocating your ideal performing-art celebrities to different designed
characters in an “augmented reality” technological vision:

Across a range of cultural media, then, the Walled City has moved from
‘real’ depictions in documentary and film to ‘unreal’ portrayals across a
range of platforms. The imagined space of the Walled City has become a
‘modern pirate utopia’ (Mead, 2014), disembedded from the lived
experience of the place itself; ‘a real without reality’ (Baudrillard, 1994: 1).
In this new, hyper-mediated context, echoes of the ‘real’ place remain but
are recast as a virtual space in which desires for anarchic urbanism are
consumed and commodified via the global film and game industries.
In the process, the idea of the Walled City has become tethered to
alternative cultural flows and eddies that have carried it – like a branch on
a river – to unpredictable contexts. 8

If I wanted to re-write about the story of “anarchic urbanism” without any worries
about whether the sight experience is real or unreal, I could set Alfred Hui, a
Canto-pop singer, to serve as a dentist at Dentist Street of Kowloon Walled City by
hiring a retail-shop unit from a Tong Lau building in a very cheap rental status

8
Alistar Fraser from University of Glasgow (UK) and Eva Cheuk-Yin Li from King's College London (UK),
"The second life of Kowloon Walled City: Crime, media and cultural memory", "Crime, Media,
Culture 2017, Vol. 13(2)", SAGE Publications (2017), Pp. 225 {Disembedding, nostalgia and cultural
flow}

11
without any legal and institutional boundaries on the issues of medical licenses and
certifications, so that he does not need to pay expensive rental fees to the greedy
property developers for a shopping-arcade unit. I portrayed Alfred Hui as healing the
tooth illness of a lifeguard, and Alfred is accompanied by the illusion of signboards
with the Regular Scripts of Yan Zhengqing (顏真卿)’s calligraphic style. As a
renowned calligrapher from Mid-Tang Dynasty, Yan Zhengqing learnt how to write
Regular Scripts under the apprenticeship of Chu Suiliang (褚遂良)9. My imitation on
Yan Zhengqing’s stele-scripts (碑學) for writing the densely-distributed signboards of
Dentist Street with the nicknames and pop-song names of Alfred Hui was based on
Yan’s masterpieces namely “The Ink-Rubbing Version of Yan’s Family Temple Stele”
(顏氏家廟碑拓本)10 and “Duobao Tower Sensational Stele” (多寶塔感應碑文)11. I
learnt from Yan Zhengqing’s academic integrity of manifesting “round brush” (圓筆)
for writing the signboard characters in black acrylic paint, which showcased a kind of
stubbornness in strokes due to the sufficient moisture for the Chinese ink in
rendering the “middle methodicalness” (中鋒).

9
Edited by Ma Chung-kei (馬重奇) and Chow Lai-ying (周麗英), “A Leisurely Talk on the Ancient
Cultural Knowledge of China” (中國古代文化知識趣談) Pp. 126. Hong Kong: Pilot Publishing
rd
Company Ltd., 3 Edition in 2002 {Unit 5: Fine Arts – Chapter 11: Ancient Fine Arts – 3. Renowned
Calligraphers}
10
Wang Yaoting (王耀庭), “A Connoisseurship on Chinese Paintings” (中國繪畫賞鑑) Pp. 85. Hong
st
Kong: Sanyutang Limited (三餘堂有限公司), 1 Edition in October 1998 {Upper Edition: A
Connoisseurship on Chinese Paintings – Chapter 6: A Coexistence between Calligraphy and Painting =
The relations between painting and calligraphy – 3. Artistic Conception and Spiritual Essence}
11
Edited by Ouyang Zhongshi (歐陽中石 主編), “The Art of Chinese Calligraphy” (中國書法藝術) Pp.
st
240. Beijing: Foreign Language Press (外文出版社), New Haven of London: Yale University Press, 1
Edition in 2007 {Chapter 4: “An epoch with the emergence of many great masters – The art of
calligraphy in Sui Dynasty, Tang Dynasty and Five Dynasties” (第四章：名家輩出的時代 — 隋唐五代
書法藝術) by Zhu Guantian (朱關田) – The calligraphic field from the splendid Mid-Tang Dynasty with
unprecedented prosperity (空前繁榮的盛中唐書壇) – Regular Scripts (楷書)}

12
 “Lifeguard’s Mysterious Experience at Dentist Street”, Acrylic on Canvas, 24” x 36”

MINIMALIST AND NON-MERITOCRACY LIVELIHOOD SERIES

Prof. Lui Chun Kwong, as my External Supervisor for this MAFA Graduation Project,
shared about his first-hand experiences of living at Kowloon Walled City. Prof. Lui’s
parents resettled him, his elder brother and them to Hong Kong when Prof. Lui was 6
years old12. Prof. Lui’s parents hired a bedspace apartment from a Tong Lau Building
inside the Kowloon Walled City for a temporary period of three months. Then, his
parents asked him to go down to Kwong Ming Road for outdoor playing with other

12
Presented by Hong Kong Arts Development Council & Leisure and Cultural Services Department,
“Figurative + Abstract – An Exhibition of Contemporary Oil Painting, Watercolor and Print of Hong
st
Kong” Pp. 71. Hong Kong: Hong Kong High Technology Limited, 1 Edition in September 2009 {Lui
Chun Kwong}
(* Lui was born in Guangdong Province China in 1956. The family moved to Hong Kong in 1962. He
graduated with a BA degree at the National Taiwan Normal University in 1980, and a MA degree at
Goldsmith’s College, University of London in 1994. He has been teaching at the Chinese University of
Hong Kong since 1985 and is currently Associate Professor of Fine Arts. In the past three decades, Lui
has organized eleven solo-exhibitions in Taiwan and Hong Kong and participated in more than
hundred group exhibitions locally and internationally. His works is in public and private collections in
Hong Kong and overseas.)

13
neighbor kids. When Prof. Lui stood onto the dark street, several pretty ladies hanged
around and touched the head of Prof. Lui by praising that he was cute, but Prof. Lui
felt uncomfortable by asking these ladies to stop disturbing him. At that time, Prof.
Lui did not know who these ladies were. But, when Prof. Lui grew up, he initially
knew that those were prostitutes and the Kowloon Walled City was a shelter for
sexual businesses.

Prof. Lui Chun Kwong indicates that I should manifest “one kind of brushstrokes for
rendering one kind of iconographies”. He wants me to attain a consistency between
the tone of the background and the tone of the subject matters, i.e. the lifeguards
with tanned skins. Just like Leon Golub’s painting called “Mercenaries V” as a
reference given by Prof. Lui, it is a piece of a dark painting or a criminal painting in
which the characters were portrayed in a two-dimensional vision. The flat application
of pigments (平塗) was as similar as the first-layered colouring techniques (設色) of
Chinese gongbi painting. So, the background will be of less dynamic strokes and you
won’t feel distorted by the clumsy and textural motions such as dehiscence and
instantaneous glimpse of movements from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s avocation. My
piece called “Press-Up of Lifeguards for Cervalat” is with the effect of paleness due to
the tranquility of the whole painting vision.

Prof. Lui Chun Kwong’s painting exhibit at Hong Kong Museum of Art stresses
determined brushstrokes, determined Expressionism, précised vision and chiaroscuro.
The skins of the four lifeguards being allocated to a dimmed-yellow street
background with a drainage of dirty water are as similar as Paul Gauguin’s
ethnographical way of portraying the nude rural ladies as African natives in Tahiti,
and the subject matters are supposed to be as similar as the primitive totem
paintings inside the mural surfaces of mountainous holes. The dimmed-yellow
background of Kwong Ming Road is consistent with the yellow vests and tanned skins
of the lifeguards in terms of attaining one consistent chrominance for one kind of
psychological mood as similar as Prof. Lui’s suggestion. I want to convey that if the
lifeguards went back to the colonial era in which the Kowloon Walled City hasn’t yet
been demolished, the lifeguards could enjoy an unreserved interaction among each
other by playing primitive games through making good use of the primitive
environment, and they won’t rely on technological devices for effective
communications which cause a feeling of alienation.

14
 “Press-Up of Lifeguards for Cervalat”, Acrylic on Canvas, 36” x 24”

The concreted observation with a concreted nude model for a life-painting creation is
a revival of the classical European tradition from the Renaissance period, in which
the detailed analysis on anatomical and muscular peculiarities is a process of
Romanticism by perceiving the gracefulness of your employed lofty and charismatic
target with an ideal mode of handsome or pretty appearances. My Kwai Hing studio
is a tiny painting environment, but I can still transform it to be a realm of
Romanticism for such professional art cultivation. My nude model was exactly my
lifeguard colleague who accompanied me to visit Taipei for autumn staycation before
the pandemic, and we jointly indulged to a realm of snack-eating everywhere at
midnight within the Simending Cosmopolitan as our location of hotel
accommodation. Our friendship is of no hierarchical barriers, and our flirting
everywhere in Taipei was of no bureaucratic restraints as similar as the meritocracy
required by British colonialists. My lifeguard colleague was willing to station for four
hours with two prelude poses in 1.5 hours for each piece and one long pose in one
hour. The two prelude poses facilitated me to begin with a fundamental level of
grid-based linear distribution methodology for pencil drawing to cultivate the
shadowed parts and three-dimensional textural peculiarities of my lifeguard model’s
horny body, as my “autofigurative sentiments” in accordance with Maurice
Merleau-Ponty’s avocation drove me to reminisce our direct youthful exposure to the
naturalistic humanity in both our swimming-pool workplace and our Taipei journey.

15
 Two pencil life-drawings on my lifeguard colleague as a nude model inside my Kwai
Hing studio to assume that he and I were within the minimalist outdoor environment
of Kowloon Walled City (A2 size, Pencil on Paper)

Then, I incorporated Prof. Lui Chun Kwong’s expectation on determined

Expressionism in my long-pose figure painting by making reference on Egon Schiele’s
language of Fauvism. Egon Scheiele stressed the dried-up skinny and distorted facial
features which were suitable for describing the hardship of labors, whereas the thin
layer of moisturized coloring with the dirts of deliberate darkness corresponded with
“broken ink” (破墨), “accumulative ink” (積墨) and “charred ink” (焦墨) effects from
Dong Qichang’s self-expressive painting theory based on his admiration on Mi Fu and
Mi Youren in his literati-painting methodology publication called “The Purposes of
Painting Art” (畫旨)13. Indeed, my approach of semi-deconstructionist labour vision
from such Fauvist style and Mi Family’s playful ink manifestation (米家墨戲) against
the extremely-refined mode of Renaissance figure painting helped complement the
dynamics of sexualism in the body lines of my lifeguard model’s semi-nudity,

13
Zhou Jiyin (周積寅), “The Theories of Chinese Painting – Edited Chapters” (中國畫論．輯要) Pp.
457. Nanjing: Jiangsu Art Press (江蘇美術出版社), 1st Edition in July 2005 {Theories on Brush-and-Ink
Methodologies (筆墨論) - Chapter 2}
{* Old-Mi Combination’s paintings were of difficulties in demonstrating a sense of roundness and
thickness. But both of them managed to apply pale ink, condensed ink, splashed ink, broken ink,
accumulative ink and chaired ink very skillfully. – “The Purposes of Painting Art” by Dong Qichang
from Ming Dynasty (老米畫難於渾厚，但用淡墨、濃墨、潑墨、破墨、積墨、焦墨，盡得之矣。 —
明．董其昌《畫旨》)}

16
accomplish Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on dehiscence and instantaneous
glimpse of movements, and ruin the moral-cum-institutional restraints of
“Caesaropapism” which imposed feudalism to obstruct lifeguards within the Walled
City from enjoying truthful friendship and unreserved flirting entertainments, as
“Caesaropapism” in classical European art only condoned an alienating description of
sages with transcendental qualities.

“Lifeguard’s Leisure without Air-Conditioning”, Acrylic on Canvas, 48” x 36”

CONCLUSION

The “New Figurative Art” is a language of narration for genre painting. It was initiated
by Max Beckmann and George Grosz during the emergence of German Expressionism
from the Bauhaus trend in the early 20th century. Painters pursuing this kind of art
language have expected that the marketing values of their works wouldn’t be
definitely cherished by official museums stressing “High Arts” due to a lack of royalty
and extreme perfection in vision. Just like how Darren Hudson Hick from the Texas
Tech University commented, “Because the pieces in the portfolio are not (or not yet)
enshrined as canonical masterpieces with a long history of critical and historical
reception, they still belong to the realm of everyday life. The images retain their
vitality because they are not icons.”14 Even for my “Kowloon Walled City Series”, I do

14
Darren Hudson Hick (Department of Philosophy, Texas Tech University), "A Book Review on <
Damien Freeman and Derek Matravers, eds. "Figuring Out Figurative Art: Contemporary
Philosophers on Contemporary Paintings". New York: Routledge, 2015, xv + 210 pp., 15 color + 2
b&w illus., $155.00 cloth, $39.95 paper. >", "The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 73:4 Fall

17
not mind reserving the ugly aesthetics (or grotesqueness) that are of no proportional,
anatomical and logical concerns as the ultimate spirit of “New Figurative Art” exactly
encourages me not to care about the possibility of being defined as “degenerate art”
once imaginative contexts with distorted facial features and exaggerative body
gestures are my prior manifestations.

All the episodes with a linkage between my lusts from my lifeguard career position
and the criminal sides of Kowloon Walled City are subjected to a daydreaming mode
of imagination. This corresponds with Jacques Rancière’s emphasis on “playful
hallucinations”, and there was a process of representation once allocating the
contemporary figures to a diminished sight-seeing to convey my desire for the
nourishments of love which are hardly realized in this over-institutionalized mode of
post-colonial era. Just like Sigmund Freud’s devoted apprentice called C. G. Jung
wrote, “Dream is a small piece of invisible and hidden gate for accessing to the
deepest side of your innermost qualities and the most secret side of your spirituality
with a kind of mysteries”15. The emancipation on sexual behaviors or the most
shameful sides of our subconscious horny desires, from our daydreaming fantasies to
the normative reality, can’t be easily conducted in our elitist society. But when there
is a collapse of all such feudalist hierarchies about qualification frameworks and a
revival of sexual-business shelters as similar as the remembrance module for a
demolished Kowloon Walled City based on Walter Benjamin’s narration ideal, I can
virtually foresee an end of my 15-year absurd dilemma about a lack of dating
opportunities once the notion of anarchic urbanism is practiced and my free
romance can never be intervened by the regular social chaos imposed by either the
legislative politicians from both ideological camps or the bureaucrats from the
regime.

(5414 words)

2015", 2015, The American Society for Aesthetics, Pp. 466 {Book Reviews}
15
Zhen Wei (甄巍), “Modern Art - Guidance for Connoisseurship Series 2” (現代美術．鑑賞導引系列
2) Pp. 102. Hong Kong: Joint Publishing (H.K.) Co., Ltd., January 2001 {Chapter 5: Dream Pool Painting
Discussion (夢溪畫談) - 1. Four kinds of dreams}

18
Painting-exhibit distribution on the 2nd Floor Area 5460-2260 of CUHK Art Museum:
As similar as how the MAFA Year 2 graduate from July 2021 displayed her paintings

Bibliography
Books:
 Written by Wolf Stubbe and Translated from the German by Richard
Waterhouse, “History of Modern Graphic Art”. The United Kingdom: Thames
and Hudson – London, Translated Edition in 1963
 Amy CHEUNG Siu-han (張小嫻), “Please fall in love with a man who is at least
as similar as a man with commitment” (請你至少愛一個像男人的男人). Hong
Kong: Crown Publishing (H.K.) Ltd., 1st Edition in September 2017
 Edited by Ma Chung-kei (馬重奇) and Chow Lai-ying (周麗英), “A Leisurely Talk
on the Ancient Cultural Knowledge of China” (中國古代文化知識趣談). Hong
Kong: Pilot Publishing Company Ltd., 3rd Edition in 2002
 Wang Yaoting (王耀庭), “A Connoisseurship on Chinese Paintings” (中國繪畫賞
鑑). Hong Kong: Sanyutang Limited (三餘堂有限公司), 1st Edition in October
1998
 Edited by Ouyang Zhongshi (歐陽中石 主編), “The Art of Chinese Calligraphy”
(中國書法藝術). Beijing: Foreign Language Press (外文出版社), New Haven of
London: Yale University Press, 1st Edition in 2007
 Zhou Jiyin (周積寅), “The Theories of Chinese Painting – Edited Chapters” (中
國畫論．輯要). Nanjing: Jiangsu Art Press (江蘇美術出版社), 1st Edition in July
2005

19
 Zhen Wei (甄巍), “Modern Art - Guidance for Connoisseurship Series 2” (現代
美術．鑑賞導引系列 2). Hong Kong: Joint Publishing (H.K.) Co., Ltd., January
2001
Catalogues:
 Curated by Professors Paul Coldwell and Stephen Farming, “Drawing:
Interpretation / Translation”. The United Kingdom: CCW Graduate School at
University of Arts London, 2011
 Presented by Hong Kong Arts Development Council & Leisure and Cultural
Services Department, “Figurative + Abstract – An Exhibition of Contemporary
Oil Painting, Watercolor and Print of Hong Kong”. Hong Kong: Hong Kong High
Technology Limited, 1st Edition in September 2009
Journals:
 Alistair Fraser and Anna Schliehe, “THE CARCERAL CITY: CONFINEMENT AND
ORDER IN HONG KONG'S FORBIDDEN ENCLAVE”, "The British Journal of
Criminology (2021) 61" (Advance Access publication on 5 January 2021), Pp. 591
 Alistar Fraser from University of Glasgow (UK) and Eva Cheuk-Yin Li from King's
College London (UK), “The second life of Kowloon Walled City: Crime, media
and cultural memory”, "Crime, Media, Culture 2017, Vol. 13(2)", SAGE
Publications (2017), Pp. 225 {Disembedding, nostalgia and cultural flow}
 Darren Hudson Hick (Department of Philosophy, Texas Tech University), “A Book
Review on < Damien Freeman and Derek Matravers, eds. "Figuring Out
Figurative Art: Contemporary Philosophers on Contemporary Paintings". New
York: Routledge, 2015, xv + 210 pp., 15 color + 2 b&w illus., $155.00 cloth,
$39.95 paper. >”, "The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 73:4 Fall 2015",
2015, The American Society for Aesthetics, Pp. 466 {Book Reviews}
Conference Paper:
 Gaetano Manfredonia from Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris & Francis Ronsin
from Université de Dijon, “E. Armand and 'la camaraderie amoureuse' -
Revolutionary sexualism and the struggle against jealousy”, Organized by
International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam: "Free Love and the
Labour Movement" second workshop in the series "Socialism and Sexuality" (Pp.
3) Amsterdam: 6 October 2000 {1. The establishment of l’en dehors and the
campaign for revolutionary sexualism}

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