Hong Kong painter Chu Hing Wah’s retrospective exhibition showcases his journey of creating art about people with mental health issues

Chu was a nursing student at the Maudsley Hospital in London in the early 1960s. In his third year, he asked his professor what he should specialise in. “He recommended art, seeing that I always spent my free time at The National Gallery and art museums. He said our medical discipline isn’t just about looking at the surface [for example, patients’ symptoms]; it’s about understanding the innate feelings of a person. If a patient [struggles to tell] you how scary his dream is, art can express it.”

Chu took up psychiatric nursing for 18 months, during which time he tried his hand at painting, mimicking the western art shown in the galleries he visited. He joined community art societies in London and took part in live painting sessions. When he went on holiday, he applied his self-taught techniques to his paintings and sketches. His early landscapes from the 1960s resemble post-impressionist art, with his use of exuberant colours in his portrayals of the places he visited, such as Paris’s streets, Eiffel Tower and Moulin Rouge, and the countryside of England’s county of Cornwall.

Chu finished his degree in 1965 and returned to Hong Kong, then started working as a staff nurse as at Castle Peak Psychiatric Hospital in 1968. He remained there until 1989, when he moved to Siu Lam for two years. In art therapy classes organised by the hospitals, he saw first-hand how painting was a platform that enabled some of the patients to express themselves. “They just live in their own world, which is different from ours,” he says, referring to how sometimes society is under the false impression that people with mental health issues are “dangerous” or “unpredictable”. “In my entire career, [my patients] never hurt me. They were really nice and I saw them as my buddies. Every morning, they would say to me, ‘Good morning, sir’; every night, ‘Goodbye, sir.’ I cared about them and I really enjoyed their company.”

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Combining his professional life with his artistic practice, Chu began to capture his patients in his paintings. “I was fascinated by their body language and thoughts, which I combined with my understanding of and empathy for them to show the public their world,” he says. “Mental illness isn’t the flu; it isn’t infectious. They didn’t choose to be born with this condition. In their recovery, as well as taking medication, it is important that their families should get to know them and not reject or give up on them. The community, too, should give them rehabilitation opportunities so that they can make their own living when they return to society.”

In the 1970s and 1980s, Chu’s paintings deviated from post-impressionism to develop his own style, which was characterised by simple forms and colour palettes, mostly dark and cold tones, an approach which evoked a sense of childlike quality that was parallel to what he describes as his patients’ “innocence”.

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On the day of Tatler’s photo shoot in November at his home in Tuen Mun, Chu eagerly unrolled his artworks one by one and placed each of them on a stand in his tiny studio upstairs, as if he was staging a mini exhibition. “I’d love to take you on a journey with different stops,” he said to Tatler, and presented a painting of a dark purple door with a key, titled Ward Door (1980, with additional elements added in 2023). “Our first stop involves opening the gate to their world,” he says, referring to those dealing with mental health issues.

Once we were “inside”, Chu fished out Staring (1992), in which a shadowy figure takes centre stage and looks at the viewer with a calm, certain look, reversing the roles of the observer and observed. People in the Garden (1987) and People in the Garden II (1994) portray the peaceful sight of Chu’s patients, in pairs, groups or solo, enjoying the greenery of the hospital’s garden. In Depressive Patient (1994), a child experiencing depression sits on the ground, his hands covering his face. All the paintings lack the drama or sensationalism one might expect from the dreamscapes of people with mental health issues. Instead, Chu highlights the ordinary, human qualities of his subjects with tenderness. His paintings, which have been exhibited at Castle Peak Hospital, Hanart TZ Gallery, local universities and the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, bring people closer to this often-overlooked and misunderstood group.

Outside of the hospitals, Chu’s devotion to the arts can be seen in his active involvement during the early period of the development of the city’s art industry. After completing a certificate course in art and design at the University of Hong Kong, he joined the art group Hong Kong Visual Arts Society in 1974, set up by his contemporaries such as Eddie Lui and Gaylord Chan. Chu led the organisation from 1983 to 1986 as its chairman, bolstering the status of Hong Kong artists in the global art market and promoting public art education at a time when there weren’t as many art galleries and museums as today. “We criticised each other’s pieces a lot. Gaylord likes criticising others, so I said to him, ‘Do you really think you’re that good? Wait until you’re criticised by me’,” Chu recalls. “It’s all jokes, of course. Constructive criticism made us all better artists.”

After retiring from his nursing profession in 1992, Chu continued to make art and returned to painting landscapes that documented the evolving Hong Kong cityscape and still lifes of flowers, subjects he also liked exploring in his earlier years. In his paintings are fundamental representations of the city’s life, sentiments and changes, one can see Victoria Harbour in the days when the skyline wasn’t blocked by as many skyscrapers as today; tenement buildings, dai pai dongs and grocery stores that no longer exist; empty streets during the pandemic; and even folk activities such as villain hitting.

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“People often say Hong Kong is where the east meets the west, and the art by me and a lot of local artists reflects this: my practice is neither east nor west, but it’s also both,” he says. “For example, in traditional Chinese ink art, fishermen are a common subject, but we’ve moved on from this. The times of being a British colony had their influence on our city; at the same time, people never really forget about our [Chinese] roots. This character of the city is interesting to me. If we can be more of a cultural melting pot, this would even be better [for the city’s artistic development]. I encourage young artists in Hong Kong today to go see the world more and not limit themselves in what they want to paint.”

His contribution to Hong Kong’s art industry has been officially recognised: he received the Urban Council Fine Arts Award in 1989 and the Painter of the Year award from Hong Kong Artists’ Guild Association in 1992. In 1993, he was granted a scholarship by the Asian Cultural Council for art research in New York, where he continued his artistic pursuits. When he returned, he served as an advisor to the Hong Kong Museum of Art, the Hong Kong Heritage Museum and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council.

A near-nonagenarian—he turns 90 in November this year—Chu is far from done with his art. The effervescent, silver-haired man is still active, regularly picking up his brushes, and even climbing up and down a ladder to hang a giant canvas on the façade of his two-storey house for the photo shoot. “Oh, I’m confident that I can continue to paint,” he says, before taking a sip of his Coke, his other hand on his hip. “I’ll still travel and promote my art and exchange ideas with artists I meet. I can’t live without art.”

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