Chu Hing Wah (b. 1935, Guangdong) is known as the ‘Peter Pan’ of the Hong Kong art circles, regarded as one of its ‘three elders’, alongside Gaylord Chan and Luis Chan. That said, being young at heart, Chu is not quite ready to hang up his boots yet, often claiming tongue-in-cheek that he is ‘just an artsy hipster’. As he enters his ninth decade, Chu staged an exhibition earlier this year, reiterating that he won’t stop drawing until he can no longer hold a paintbrush, which impresses many of us with his perseverance.

Many people associate Chu’s works primarily with his melancholic style, which explores the inner world of mentally ill patients. However, his creation does not begin with heavy brushstrokes. As a child, he witnessed the bombing of houses in his hometown Xinhui by the Japanese army. Amidst the ruins, he amused himself by etching patterns on bricks and rubble with a knife. If the child is indeed ‘father to the man’, as the saying goes, Chu’s optimistic personality was formed in childhood and influences him to this day. The 1960s were his heyday. A psychiatric nursing student in the UK, he visited art museums and galleries where he learnt the style from art masters on his own. His works during this time were brilliantly coloured and brimmed with the bliss of making art on the road and growing as an artist.

After returning to Hong Kong, Chu worked as a psychiatric nurse and enrolled in a certificate course in Art and Design from the Department of Extra-Mural Studies of the University of Hong Kong. His main creative subjects were life with mental illness and the interiority of that life. He depicted loneliness, confusion and depression with simple lines and a down-to-earth, no-frills style. There is nothing excessive or exaggerated in his interpretation of that complex internal world, only a glimpse of tranquillity amid sombre pigments to indicate his empathy for his subjects.

After his retirement in 1992, Chu committed himself fully to art and has since taken part in several exhibitions. This new chapter brought unending inspiration, his creative topics grew in range, and his palette became bright and vivid. He travelled widely , painting profusely, and capturing people and landscapes with his brush as if reliving his student days in the UK.

Having lived for over half a century, Chu has seen all the glitz and glamour of the world. His art of this era reflected an optimistic and receptive outlook; a child-like purity oozed from his brush. High-rises, the Yau Ma Tei Wholesale Fruit Market, Temple Street fortune-tellers, and a family reunion at the Mid-Autumn Festival could all inspire him and did. The day we met for a chat, he advised, ‘Go out and look around. Don’t vegetate at home. You’ll see a lot and life is richer for it. You’ll be inspired and happy.’ Always keeping it fresh and staying curious — keys to perpetual youth.

M+ has eleven works by Chu Hing-wah in its collection. In addition to Harbour Viewing Tower and Cantonese Opera Showtime!, both commissioned by West Kowloon Bamboo Theatre, the remaining nine are ink-and-colour paintings on paper created at various stages of his career, ranging from depictions of patient life as a nurse to early retirement, as well as works made after 2000. Chu wields Chinese ink wash and pigments with ease, creating contrast — ‘full’ and ‘empty’, ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ — and order to expressions of colour. This is notably apparent in his late and post-retirement works, which feature bold palette choices, rich layering, and strong visual impact.

Chu’s 1997 work Autumn is a brightly coloured landscape painting with a three-layered composition: fields in the foreground, trees further away behind a small country road acting as divider, and in the background, mountains at sunset and the evening sky. Like most of Chu’s art, Autumn is concerned with people. A female figure holding an umbrella stands in the centre. The simple lines defining her contrast with the pointillism of the rest of the canvas, while neutral colouring merges her with the shimmering autumn fields. One cannot help wondering: Is she the protagonist or a supporting character of the painting? Strolling alone between golden rice paddies in the evening rain, is she lonely or carefree? Perhaps this is the intended room of imagination Chu leaves us with.

This painting, which Chu created five years into his retirement, features more brilliant colours than in previous works, as well as the use of pointillism, a rare style in his oeuvre. The palette is dominated by warm tones denoting a golden autumn, yet gloom seeps from the blue raindrops and the figure’s lonesome back view, showing that Chu hovered between the dark painting style of his earlier works and the bright colours found in his later pieces. The background colour is pinkish grey in varying gradients – lighter where the fields are and darkest in the sky. Except for the figure, the painting is covered with tiny dots of colour, whose colour combinations, density, shape and extent of overlap are manipulated to create the illusion of images. Fields in the foreground comprise dots in a mix of opaque yellow, dark blue and dark greyish green, with the yellow ones wider than the rest. Fields further away feature the same green with yellow and blue dots in a lighter shade, which seems to blur the scenery. By subtly tweaking the colours, Chu shrewdly separates foreground and background. The canvas is dominated by yellow dots which are autumnal and work with blue, dark greyish green, and red to manifest scenic elements that combine into a pleasant and harmonious whole.

Having crossed many scenic landscapes and explored the complex emotional worlds, Chu returns to the basics, embracing simple composition, bare lines, and vivid colours as he presents his vision in his distinctive fashion. ‘Every painting is my diary and all paintings together make up my biography.’ This is perhaps the best conclusion to Chu Hing-wah’s creative career — a brilliant diary of his colourful days.