YUNG Cheuk-kwok

“Calligraphy, dip the ink, painting and yellow color.”

Cheuk-kwok is a perfectionist. He will tear up a painting and toss it into the bin if he is a little dissatisfied with it. When Yung feels excited, he spins his body and moves his limbs but he becomes focused during his creation. As he has a high demand of his works, he will make modifications to them from time to time. He just needs little hints during his learning for his strong ability to apprehend. Sometimes, it seems that he takes no heed of the hints, but when he understands and digests them, he will transform them to be his own way of expression.

Cheuk-kwok has focused on one theme each year for his painting. With the same theme, the content seems very similar. However, the complexity, amounts of details, ratios in the objects and space have shown subtle changes with the flow of time. His works have become more organized and sophisticated at the later stage of his art learning. Recently, he focuses on painting of his parents. Themes of his previous paintings were those he learned from the class. But now he chooses his own theme. What motivates him to paint his father again and again in various representations this year? What kind of affection he is revealing through the color pencils?

Being persistent, Cheuk-kwok has his own way of doing things. Just like others, he reads newspaper in the direction from left to right, which is in the opposite way when we write Chinese calligraphy. However, he insists to write calligraphy from left to right. In order to help him understand the order of Chinese calligraphy writing, his instructor proposedly prepared a set of slides guiding him the writing order. However, in the end, he keeps on writing from left to right. He has never learned Chinese calligraphy through copying a copybook. Instead he created his own writing font – “Yung Style”. The characters are comparatively slim, written straightforwardly in one stroke without any openings. This reflects his character of loving neatness and tidiness. He is fond of a book on collection of Chinese New Year Blessing Phrases. He constantly refers to this book for his Chinese calligraphy writing practice. Despite his writing style being very different from tradition, he gains this uniqueness by writing from left to right in the font created by himself.