Gallery in the skies: in conversation with cityscape painter Elaine Chiu

For Hong Kong-born artist Elaine Chiu , using Hong Kong’s buildings as her paintings’ subject matter is like translating a personal conversation to her viewers. “It's like conducting an interview with the building,” she says. “I want to tell viewers what history [the building] has been through and what kind of characteristics and personality it has.” 

Born in 1996, Chiu is part of the youngest cohort of millennial artists to have witnessed Hong Kong’s rapid urban development, having lived through her formative years both before and after the birth of the internet and vast digitalisation. Most of her work investigates the city’s architectural landscapes while also showcasing her intimate exploration of her self-identity, “usually through the format of painting or location sketches, performances and sculptures,” she shares.

Chiu found an early connection with art, as her mother was a painter, and started playing with paint when she was a toddler. “I’ve never been separated from my paintbrush since then,” she says. 

She went on to study art history and sociology at the University of Hong Kong. It was during her time here that she began her urban sketching project, visiting each of Hong Kong’s 18 districts to sketch en plein air, usually using the neighbourhood’s oldest buildings and grassroots urban scenes as focal points. 

To Chiu, discovering each building’s details became akin to learning about another facet of her own self. From drawing old tenement buildings in Yau Ma Tei to crowded streetscapes in Sham Shui Po, she pursued urban sketching almost as portraiture. “The more I sketched Hong Kong neighbourhoods, the more I fell for it: when you dive deep into Hong Kong's cityscape, for me, it's like painting a self-portrait,” she says. “[These cityscapes are] full of eastern and western qualities, so it's like a hybrid of many cultures, just like myself.” 

Today, whenever Chiu visits a new city, she still brings a sketchbook and a small watercolour kit so that she can get to intimately know a new place in the same way.  

In her formal body of work, through a mix of watercolour and acrylic paint, her paintings decode and reassemble a unique slice of the Hong Kong experience through her eyes, using a vibrant array of grids and abstracted pixels. It is at once a meditation on her own multi-faceted identity as well as her attempt to document Hong Kong’s old and fading urban landscapes.

Two of her pieces have been selected for our Gallery in the skies series, and will be displayed in the Business cabins on board our Boeing 777-300ER aircraft.

“The two paintings, A Journey Across the Land and Sea and HKU x SJC depict my journey of searching for my language in art,” she says. 

Painted from a bird’s eye view, A Journey Across the Land and Sea is a milestone for the artist in developing her hybrid language of expression – the blend of watercolour and acrylic – that straddles the east and the west. Meanwhile, HKU x SJC showcases her alma mater HKU and her university college St. John’s College, with its distinct architecture forming “tectonic plates” that join together in a world map format.

“Both of these works showcase my hope for how we can fly and unite the whole world,” she shares. 

For Chiu, watercolour was the artistic medium she first delved into as an artist, and she calls it her own artistic “mother tongue”. “Watercolour symbolises my roots in the eastern culture. It [involves] a Chinese way of painting, thinking and composition – like how to deal with fluidity and leaving white space.”

While she finds it challenging, Chiu enjoys exploring the level of intensity and fluidity required to blend both watercolour and acrylic into one succinct visual language – the way a bilingual may feel when they try to retain fluency in two languages. “When I work with watercolour it's like speaking Cantonese or Chinese, it's very natural to me. But I feel very lucky that I got a chance to explore and expand my [visual] languages into acrylic.” 

Through her work, A Journey Across the Land and Sea, Chiu demonstrates a perspective that is firmly rooted in being an artist in Hong Kong. “For me it's like finding a middle ground between east and west; [sticking to] my roots and new exploration,” she explains. “I’m so happy that I can translate my eastern roots into something more universal.” 

Hong Kong is one of the biggest influences on Chiu’s art, whether literally depicted or more subconsciously. “Living in an international city, I get to be a cultural translator on a daily basis,” she explains. “I like how exciting it can be, because every day I select and translate some [aspects of] Chinese culture to foreigners and vice versa.” 

Weaving in inspiration from modern Chinese art history and ink art, she strives to create a universal language for the future through her abstract techniques, all without mistranslating for her viewers. She cites a quote from her artistic idol Wu Guanzhong, commonly acknowledged as one of the founders of modern Chinese painting, that guides her in her craft: keeping the balance between abstraction and retaining a grounded human connection is much like “flying a kite with an unbroken line.” Conversely, if you allow yourself too much loose abstraction, you will lose the human touch.  

No matter the mode or medium Chiu experiments with next, she will always have the human connection as her guiding principle. “Connection is really a backbone of my future exploration,” she says. “No matter how high you fly in your artistic pursuit, you keep a string, pull it back and keep your feet firmly rooted in the ground.”

“I hope that when travellers see my work on the plane, they are reminded of a sense of home.”