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Intimate Portrait
#NoPainNoFilterBouie Choi
What was your motivation behind painting on wood? What makes the biggest difference between painting on wood and painting on paper or canvas?
I have always painted on wooden boards but treated them like a canvas. Over the past few years, through participating in conservation projects at the Blue House, I gained a deeper understanding of Hong Kong’s life stories and learnt much about wood restoration and protection from various craftsmen. I discovered that wood as a material for making art will always carry with it marks of its origin, its story, flaws, grain pattern and colour. Unlike paper, a piece of wood can withstand repeated sanding and having paint splattered and flowing on it, and therefore it is a better vehicle for retaining and reflecting my changing state of mind during the painting process.
Many artists who work with wood as a medium create sculptures and three-dimensional artworks. Are your paintings on wood a form of sculpture or three-dimensional artwork?
At this stage, I am approaching my wooden paintings with a mindset more aligned with traditional painting.
Your often explore the people, buildings and memories of the city in your work. How does this theme influence your artistic style?
For me, painting cityscapes is like finding a vessel for different stories and memories from various times, a place where seemingly insignificant individuals can go. That’s why sometimes I incorporate different perspectives within a single composition, as if erasing and reassembling the boundaries of the city. There is a sense of familiarity, yet also a sense of divergence. I enjoy this method of oscillating between the real and the unreal.
Your artwork in the form of a postcard Drifting Wood has interactive elements and carries different meanings depending on the individuals who come into contact with it. Will you create more interactive artworks in the future?
I started creating artwork in postcard form with the intention to explore how to bring out the lighter and more fluid aspects of paintings that are often seen as solemn and distant. I envisioned not only the recipient of the postcard as the audience, but the postal workers silently working behind the scenes as the first real audiences. Last year, during my residency in Switzerland, I embarked on a small project called Drifting Wood where I sent postcards to distant friends to share observations and thoughts about my residency. The most interesting part of the process was interacting with postal workers at the post office counters, where they shared thoughts and memories about postcards from their childhood. I believe this can develop into a sustainable project for experimenting with different cultural backdrops.
The hexagonal shape in the Here and there series evokes associations with screws or honeycombs in nature (mediators that are closely interconnected). Do you hope that viewers will see the hidden assemblage or connection inherent in the imagery of this series of artworks?
I imagined the Here and there series as a collection in progress for depicting hexagonal artworks from different times and perspectives within a city. They form a connected and interdependent series, but they are also scattered and dispersed in various places. I hope that one day, whether it’s a retrospective exhibition after my passing or for some special occasion, these dispersed little fellows can be reassembled to reconstruct that beautiful and ugly place we call “home”.
