11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Ching Lin Terrace 2022 / Oil on canvas / 202.7 x 146cm / The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art. Purchased 2024 with funds from Michael Sidney Myer through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / Image courtesy: The artist of tissues, are all rendered affectionately in exquisite detail. The eye then shifts — as if through the open window — to the lower portion of the canvas, with its top-down view of an empty public area, where a drying rack suspends garments on coathangers over the jagged gables and ceramic tiles of a temple below. A hillside residential area in Kennedy Town, Ching Lin Terrace is known for its quiet, ‘old Hong Kong’ atmosphere and the historic Lo Pan temple, whose unusual roof design Yeung so ably reproduces. Such attention to local detail has contributed to a recent surge in the artist’s popularity as the city’s cultural scene recalibrates in the wake of significant political and legal changes. As critic Alex Yiu has noted, Yeung’s practice is not simply reducible to a mere nostalgic ‘Hong Kongness’. Rather, the artist’s ‘solid painting technique, unique perspectives, and vivid compositions’ move beyond cliché by using the canvas to condense time and space in a manner that Yiu describes as ‘heterotopic’. 2 Or as Yeung Tong Lung states: I’m not trying to tell any stories about anybody. I just want to talk about painting. Painting is an ancient art, so it’s got a very well-developed language. There are a lot of rules, but if you treat these rules as a challenge, then there are a lot of things you can play with . . . At the end of the day, what is art about? It’s about breaking rules. It’s also how I see life, I suppose. 3 REUBENKEEHAN NOTES 1 Phoebe Wong (ed.), Mute Pianos: Forty Years of Paintings by Yeung Tong Lung , MCCM Creations and Hong Kong University Museum and Art Gallery, 2021. 2 Alex Yiu, ‘Yeung Tong Lung & Sze Yuen’s “Solo • Exhibition • Twice II: Of Seeing”’, Art Asia Pacific , 4 October 2023, <artasiapacific.com/shows/yeung-tong- lung-sze-yuen-s-solo-exhibition-twice-ii- of-seeing>, viewed March 2024. 3 Yeung Tong Lung, quoted in Christie Lee, ‘Yeung Tong-Lung’s paintings offer more than just their subjects’, Zolima City Mag , 12 March 2019, <zolimacitymag.com/yeung- tong-lungs-paintings-offer-more-than- just-their-subjects>, viewed March 2024. and smartphone screens provide even broader, more playful glimpses of Yeung’s Hong Kong that increase the paintings’ visual and spatial possibilities. 360°+ 2021–23 is an ambitious 18-panel painting based on views from his studio in Kennedy Town, at the western end of Hong Kong Island. It features four panoramas joined in a long, scroll-like format to create a circular view, along with 14 vignettes of an unusually quiet Hong Kong. Glimpses of face masks are reminders that the work was made largely during periods of COVID-19 lockdown, and despite moments of genuine charm and levity — a balcony haircut, two young people taking in a sunset — there is a haunting quality to the work, attributable in part to its creation following a period of significant unrest. One deliberately jarring image of a bombed-out room is drawn from the war in Ukraine. This is in keeping with the artist’s tendency to include current events in his range of images, as if to stress their contemporaneity and broader social relevance, whether as products of a given point in time or humble interventions into it. Taking advantage of a portrait format and an aerial viewpoint, together with perspectival liberties, Ching Lin Terrace 2022 divides its interior and exterior spaces between the vertical halves of the canvas. The eye is first drawn to the upper half, where a father and baby lie together on the floor — their light, casual dress and a nearby water bottle suggesting the heat of a summer afternoon. As the baby sleeps, the man is absorbed in the screen of his smartphone. The inner cover of their pillow, an open bag of potato chips, an array of potted plants, as well as the patterns on the baby’s nappy and blanket, even a box ARTISTS+PROJECTS 210 — 211