The M K Lau Collection, one of Asia’s finest private collections of modern and contemporary ink, presents Irene Chou Rediscovered: Paintings from the M K Lau Collection, a small-scale exhibition that brings awareness, not only to an early Chou masterpiece that has been hidden from public view for decades, but also the scope of the artist’s talent. The exhibition celebrates Chou’s creative journey over a twenty-year period and offers unique insights into the artist’s personality, interests and convictions. Open from Thursday 14 November 2019 to Sunday 9 February 2020 at Duddell’s, with an accompanying talks programme.
Born in 1924 to cosmopolitan and progressive parents in Shanghai, the by then married Chou left China for Taipei and eventually Hong Kong in 1949, where she first formally studied Chinese painting, initially in the 1950s as a student of Zhao Shao’ang (1905-1998). From the 1960s the distinctive and independent Chou was drawn increasingly toward experimentation, and then in 1966 by meeting Lui Shou-kwan (1919-1975), was drawn inexorably towards his expansive thinking, developing into a key member of the Hong Kong New Ink Painting Movement. Her multifaceted and diverse visual language was consistently defined by a level of profound insight that manifested itself in Chou’s art as a unique expression of the spirit of her times, and a representation of a modern woman, daughter, sister, wife, mother and artist.
The recent rediscovery of Untitled, 1971, is a significant moment in further understanding Chou’s artistic development and adequately paying tribute to a female artist whose forward thinking and creative freedom remains so relevant today. The over four-meter-long painting was specially commissioned in the early 1970s for the Pavilion restaurant in the iconic, and now-demolished, Lee Gardens Hotel in Causeway Bay, at a point when Chou’s individual visual language and confidence as an artist was breaking free. In endorsing the commission of five paintings by Hong Kong artists, Mr J. S. Lee, esteemed art collector and eventual Chairman of the hotel, championed Hong Kong’s incipient New Ink Painting Movement and the independent, modernising thinking of Hong Kong’s artists.
Untitled, shown to the public for the first time in decades in Irene Chou Rediscovered: Paintings from the M K Lau Collection, allows a new perspective on how the artist developed and matured her stylistic expression of texture, rhythm and tension to visualise human emotions and spiritual convictions – at once individual and universal. Dramatic and surreal, the painting is a poetic and fantastical depiction of nature that is compositionally dominated by an egg-like shape that emanates distinctly feminine energy and vitality against the dark, twisted tree forms, and piercing angular rocks of the foreground.
The sobriety and gravitas of Untitled is juxtaposed in the exhibition with Chou’s diverse stylistic and technical approaches. Her irrepressible desire to remove the limitations of imagination and celebrate the vitality and energy of life is encapsulated in To be A Happy and Honest Person and Heavenly Dance, typically exuberant splashed ink works, which seen alongside the colourful leaves from several albums, particularly the small-scale accordion-style Album of Abstract Paintings demonstrates Chou’s creative use of materials, her consistent searching of cosmic themes and her re-working of techniques long known, but used in a daringly and dynamically reimagined.
Victor Lo, co-founder of the M K Lau Collection, said: “We were delighted in 2015 to acquire Untitled, a significant, early work and are even more delighted to highlight it as the focus of our exhibition celebrating Irene Chou and her artistic legacy. The M K Lau Collection has been dedicated for over three decades to honouring the mastery of modern and contemporary ink artists.”
Catherine Maudsley, M K Lau Collection’s senior advisor and curator, added, “The journey of researching the provenance of Untitled has been an exciting project, which has not only allowed us to celebrate previously underappreciated stylistic elements in Irene Chou’s work, but also the history of a significant 1970s Hong Kong art commission. Irene Chou was a dearly loved friend. The exploration and exhibiting of Untitled is a wholly fulfilling way of paying tribute to her by honouring her indomitable spirit and artistic prowess.”
