H: Drawing has been my interest but I probably inherited my family’s artistic genes. My big fraternal uncle Hau Yu-ping, a member of the Lingnan School of Painting during its formative years, joined the group’s leading pioneer Gao Jianfu to study painting in Japan. As for myself, I first studied arts and crafts at the South China University of Arts in Guangzhou and later graduated from a professional course at the Guangzhou Institute of Education.

Flashback thirty-odd years ago, I recall I left my editorial job at an arts magazine under the Guangdong Provincial Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, for a brand-new life in Hong Kong with my wife and son. I took up a new position in interior and landscape design at the Conic Group (now China Aerospace International Holdings Limited), wherein one of my brainchildren was the architectural drawings for the Good Wish Garden at Wong Tai Sin Temple. Later, I quitted to teach arts full-time.

H: Live portrait sketching. As an arts student I used to sneak into the Guangzhou Zoo via its rear exit during my lunch break, and spent the entire afternoon there drawing animals. Even now I would do quick sketches of different facets of people’s lives during my metro rides. In the days before the popularisation of cameras, quick sketching was the most direct and convenient way to capture and record day-to-day moments. Though it is easily relegated to obscurity in the time of smartphones, I still hope to restore and communicate the value of quick sketching to people that, instead of being treated as a sub-genre of sketching, it should be regarded an art discipline in its own right.

To facilitate exchanges between quick sketching artists, Mainland Chinese netizens started a WeChat group loosely translated “In an Instant” where works are posted for peer appreciation and review. Some of my quick sketches have won merit awards at national exhibitions and showcased in Guangzhou, Beijing and other cities.

H: Rather than defining it as a school or style, it is more accurately described as an art phenomenon that arose from a specific historical environment. It dates back to the time before the Cultural Revolution with a bunch of impoverished youngsters who sustained on nothing but a love for Russian literature and a passion for oil painting. Turned away by formal art schools, they banded together to do still life drawing by the bank of Lu Lake in the Baiyun mountain scenic district and the “Lulake School”, essentially an art group, came about as a result of this alliance. Despite being a junior high school student, I was introduced to this group of young artists and made the acquaintance of them through a senior student who was president of the school art club. We have taken separate paths since then but have always kept in touch and even published a collected volume of our paintings together.