EVENT DESCRIPTION
How do you feel about Hong Kong?
「The severe lack of physical and spiritual space really caved in on me, it is a complex combination of other people’s opinions, judgments, presences, civil rights, arguments, values, unwritten rules and traditions, overly fast pace, forming a metaphoric well trapping those whoever hungers for freedom and liberation.」
-Ben Liu
ABOUT THE ARTIST / ORGANISER
Graduated from Hong Kong Arts School,
Ben Liu originally aimed to be a manga artist more than a painter since I was a kid, but after working in Hong Kong for a few years, he started to see painting as a very expressive way to narrate his feelings, and started to treat it seriously, trying to get a career out of it. Ben Liu always struggle to fit into the Hong Kong society despite the fact that he grew up with it, as an individual, as a unit in this society, Ben felt that people in HK are given too little space both physically and mentally, sharing a small space with millions of people requires us to be responsible to trim our uniqueness in order to make way for the existence of the people nearby. The overly judgmental atmosphere, the extreme fast pace makes me suffocate and depressed, and this combination of negative feelings start to become a clear, figurative, visualized, series of images, and Ben has the urge to paint them badly. Not only is it a way to express but also a way to heal and fulfill his desire of transforming something negative that can only be destructive to my soul, into something creative, inspiring, and satisfying.
