HONG KONG ARTIST PAINTS THE MENTALLY ILL SO PEOPLE CAN BETTER UNDERSTAND THEM

Retired Hong Kong psychiatric nurse Chu Hing-wah, exhibiting now at Hanart TZ Gallery, wants to use his experiences to battle misconceptions

Ninety-year-old retired psychiatric nurse Chu Hing-wah spent a third of his life training and working in hospitals. Witnessing the plight of psychiatric patients from 1963 to 1992 left him deeply touched and inspired a more than 60-year artistic practice, for which he is still creating art on Chinese xuan paper, in mixed media installations and for Cantonese opera.

Chu's retrospective at Hong Kong's Hanart TZ Gallery, "Happy 90th Birthday Uncle Chu!", features more than 60 works spanning those six decades and is a celebration of the mostly self-taught artist's personal and professional experiences, both in and outside the psychiatric ward.

When he graduated with his degree in general nursing in London in 1963, he discussed his next steps with the school dean, who had experience in psychiatry and knew that Chu often visited galleries and museums during his time off.

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"She said, 'You have so much interest in art, and now you have knowledge in general and surgical nursing [skills] to help patients with their external suffering, but do you know what's going on in their heads?'

"I didn't know. The doctor tells me to give them medicine and stitch them up - critical efforts but surface level. But psychiatry is about the human mind."

Between 1963 and 1965, he studied a postgraduate programme in psychiatric nursing at London's Maudsley Hospital.

He likens studying general and surgical medicine to painting still-life objects such as apples and flowers, whereas psychiatry adds more substance to his artistic practice.

Many of the paintings at Chu's exhibition are of his former patients, mostly from Castle Peak Hospital, the oldest and largest psychiatric hospital in Hong Kong, where he worked as a staff nurse from 1968 to 1989 before moving to Siu Lam Hospital in Tsuen Wan for three years until his retirement.

"Psychiatric patients' minds are very different from ours. They live in their own worlds, which is what I've painted for these past decades," he says.

"We see mental illnesses depicted on television and radio, which only talk about how weird they are. But how are they 'weird'? There are a lot of misconceptions, but they're only human, and as long as we understand how their brains work, we can help them."

Some of Chu's past patients are shown in individual portraits, such as Solitude (1996), in which a patient with depression is painted in a dark scene with cold colours, even the weight of the air seemingly a burden.

Many of his works feature multiple figures sharing a space but standing far from each other, united in loneliness.

One such example is Happy Birthday, Kau Chai! (1987-2003), a mixed-media installation comprising a painted piece of fabric and two wooden sculptures.

Images of patients are painted on the fabric, which serves as a backdrop. One of the sculptures resembles a birthday cake, for which Chu used wood, painted nails, colourful wires and cardboard paper. It stands next to a wooden rendering of "Kau Chai", a cognitively challenged patient from Castle Peak Hospital.

The 1992 painting Living in Their Own Worlds (In the Ward Garden) depicts a similar scene. The colours are vibrant, but the patients seem to be all facing away from one another in a small, disconnected community.

"You can see it in their body language, which is different from that of 'normal' people," Chu says. "Depression patients usually just sit there, from day to night, without making a sound. There's a garden in every ward, but patients there often keep to themselves and don't really interact with each other."

Love in Silence (1996), featuring two people sharing a quiet embrace on a bench, is a rare exception. Inspired by Pointillism, a post-Impressionist technique that emerged in the 1880s, the painting is of a mentally ill couple.

"It's not a realistic portrayal, but we can still see the structure of the scene," Chu says.

"There are 'abnormal' people like that in the world. What can we do aside from trying to understand and help them?

"I've never seen a Hong Kong exhibition on the topic [of mental illness]. I thought I should present my knowledge and experience to society."

His past patients are not his only subjects. In Sad Moon at a Cloudy Night (2023), he painted a moment shared between him and his wife in a poeticised expression of a quiet family life that sometimes gets lonely, he says, as "we don't have a lot of children running around".

The artwork title in poetic Chinese - instead of "sad", the moon is described more as "cold" - is written on the margin of the painting, a method that perhaps harks back to the works of ancient Chinese masters.

Meanwhile, in The Anxious Artist (1991), Chu uses his own likeness to portray a mind racing endlessly.

He says his paintings are like his diary entries, which altogether make up his autobiography: "My work portrays reality and the things which happen in my life."

Despite concentrating on using Chinese painting materials such as xuan paper and Chinese ink and brushes, Chu likes to mix up techniques. For example, for many of his works, he paints on both sides of the paper.

"It creates a looser texture visually that allows me to express, more intimately, the deep layers of human emotion," he says, adding that he sometimes incorporates pastel and crayon in his works, too.

Everyday Hong Kong life is also a frequent subject in his work.

White Crane, White Blossoms and Fisherman (2023) is a fantastical landscape painted after a visit to the Hong Kong Zoological and Botanical Gardens.

"It was an imagined scene. I used a lot of black and purple colours and added a fisherman to create a dreamlike atmosphere at sunset."

He shows off his wide range of styles and inspirations in Hurricane (2023), in which the abstractly painted stormy waves stray from his usual style. He got the idea when he visited his friend on the east end of Hong Kong Island during extreme weather.

Although his subject matter can differ vastly, at the core of his work is the beauty in mundanity - of life and, mostly, people.

"I love people and I cannot separate from them. I am very interested in humanity and human emotions."

Growing up near Temple Street in Kowloon, he became acquainted with Cantonese opera at a young age as his father worked as an accountant at the Astor Theatre (previously known as Po Hing Theatre), which has since been demolished.

"Whenever there was a good show on, he would take me to see it," says Chu, who started learning to perform Cantonese opera in the early 1950s. "I was only a teenager then and developed a love for Cantonese opera."

Two of his artworks are of Cantonese opera performers - A Formidable Princess (2023) and Handsome Emperor (2023) - which were painted based on sketches he made for a project many years ago in the early developmental stage of the West Kowloon Cultural District.

Chu says he pours all of his life into painting.

"I feel really blessed to be a painter. It gives me everything I need mentally. Mahjong is fine - nothing wrong with it - but painting, to me, is very important to my mental health.

"My most enjoyable moments are between getting ready for bed and falling asleep. Very naturally, somehow, I would feel something connecting within me, turning real-life matters into artistic visions.

"It's something that I've always been very interested in and has acted as a tonic for my brain, keeping me sane. Whether it's real life, conscious life or abstract life, my brain turns it all into subject matters for my paintings."

"Happy 90th Birthday Uncle Chu!", Hanart TZ Gallery, 2/F, Mai On Industry Building, 17-21 Kung Yip Street, Kwai Chung, New Territories. Monday to Friday, 10am to 6.30pm; Saturday 10am to 6pm; closed on Sundays and public holidays. Until March 1.

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2025-02-10T05:09:19Z