Memento (White Shirt) from 2014 is a painting by Hong Kong artist Au Hoi Lam. While it appears simple and even clinical in composition, its minimal qualities are in fact the very same qualities that give the work its emotional weight. Set on a hand-painted grid of white lines on a dark grey surface are two thin transparent layers of dark and light turquoise green acrylic paint anchored with a pale square of colour in the lower right of the canvas. The softer edges of the light-green layer give this part of the painting a feeling of movement and transparency, recalling a sheet of fabric being subjected to the whims of a breeze. Traces of writing, notes, and doodles in pencil, only just visible beneath the thin paint, emphasise this material transparency, and hint at what may lie beneath the surface of what, or who, we think we see.

In the short exposition below, written ten years before Memento (White Shirt) was made, the artist shares how the act of painting is intimately connected to her personal experiences and feelings:^[1]

Au Hoi Lam was born in Hong Kong in 1978 and is an artist whose primary practice is painting. A graduate of the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Fine Arts Department, she is known for creating environments or tableaux through her paintings that are presented as remnants of lived experiences or relationships.

Whether fictional or autobiographical, Au’s works read like portraits of her emotional life, diaries of experiences enacted and executed in muted pastel shades that establish an immediate intimacy with her audiences, and the melancholic passing of time. Au’s work blurs the boundaries between what may be art and the treasured mementoes and keepsakes of an event, a person, or an experience.

Au Hoi Lam is one of the most respected artists of her generation, widely admired for her delicate, thought-provoking paintings and environments. Her works reveal a deep understanding of the histories of abstraction and minimalism, and can be said to share a lineage with American artists such as Agnes Martin, for whom minimalism and abstraction is a way of ordering a rich and complex emotional life, and Cy Twombly, who reduced painting to a form of marks, scribbles, and signs on otherwise blank canvases. A closer reading also uncovers how Au’s paintings possess a strong Hong Kong sensibility. Through the artist’s adaptation of some of the conventions associated with the tradition of ink painting—transparency, layering, and the use of calligraphic mark-making—Au not only appropriates; she also challenges the orthodoxy.