With its innovative use of aerial perspective in portrait format and the device of an open window, Ching Lin Terrace 2022 is a richly textured example of Yeung Tong Lung’s distinctive technique of capturing Hong Kong’s interior and exterior spaces within a single pictorial plane. The upper half features a father and his baby at rest on a hot day; while the baby sleeps, the father is absorbed in the screen of his smart phone. The lower portion of the canvas presents a top-down view of the public area outside, where a drying rack suspends a handful of garments over a temple roof and a palm-fringed courtyard below. Rendered with both emotional looseness and exquisite detail, the painting is an affectionate portrait of ordinary people and the spaces they inhabit.

Artist biography

Yeung Tong Lung 
Born 1956, Fujian, China
Lives and works in Hong Kong 

Yeung Tong Lung has been a respected figure in Hong Kong art for four decades, celebrated for his nuanced portraits of daily life in the less visible sides of his city. His canvases depict housing estates, migrant workers and neighbourhood eccentrics in streets, stores, kitchens and flats with detail, wit and a vivid realism that incorporates fluid distortions and reflections through warped pictorial planes that permit the inclusion of multiple viewpoints. These trademark perspectival shifts provide expansive context for Yeung’s depiction of Hong Kong, increasing the paintings’ visual and spatial possibilities.

For the Asia Pacific Triennial, he presents works of touching intimacy and striking ambition, including a 20-metre, 18-panel, 360-degree panorama of Kennedy Town, at the western end of Hong Kong Island, as viewed from the artist’s studio.