My Three Friends: Paintings by Lu Chen, Zhou Sicong and Shi Hu
21 January to 26 April 2011

The University Museum and Art Gallery of The University of Hong Kong is delighted to present an exhibition of paintings by Lu Chen (1935–2003), Zhou Sicong (1939–1996), and Shi Hu (1942–) collected by Dr Leung Kam Ching over the course of thirty years. A keen collector of Chinese antiquities, Dr Leung began to include contemporary paintings to his Jian Gu Xuan collection in the 1980s. Leung’s interest in traditional Chinese culture, and specifically the expression of the human figure, can be seen as a consistent theme throughout his painting collection. Another prominent theme is that of friendship as Leung’s collecting arose out of his close personal relationships both with the husband and wife team of Lu Chen and Zhou Sicong, as well as with the iconoclastic contemporary artist Shi Hu.

In the humorous and idiosyncratic paintings of Lu Chen, well-known Chinese figures such as Zhong Kui, literatus Su Dongpo, or the poets Qu Yuan and Li Bo are drawn filled with personality while Zhou Sicong’s paintings are more anthropological in nature. She investigates the lives of women charmingly depicted as folk subjects. The paintings by maverick artist Shi Hu are the most abstract and challenging in the collection but in their combination of ink splash, line, colour and void, they are also the most visually rewarding.

The exhibition will show a selection of around 60 paintings by these three artists, mostly in ink and colour on paper.