Swedish artist Andy Renard looks back on the years he spent in Hong Kong and China — and how the people, contrasts and memories of those places still find their way into his art. Decades later, Hong Kong remains closer than he sometimes realises.
I was working on the Traditional Chinese version of my artist website when I suddenly recognised a character:
人
I knew that one. A person. A human being.
It was one of those strange little moments when something you thought had disappeared from your memory turns out to have been there all along.
When I lived in Hong Kong, I wanted to learn something of the language of the place I was living in. That has always felt natural to me. If you live somewhere, you should at least make an effort to understand something of its language, its traditions and the people around you.
So I tried to learn Cantonese. I studied a little on my own, and for a while a Chinese woman would come to our home and teach my then wife and me. We had great fun together, although I sometimes suspect we spent more time laughing than actually learning Cantonese.
I never learned to write Chinese properly, and I certainly wouldn’t claim to speak Cantonese today. But I learned enough to find my way around, give directions to a taxi driver, order food and manage some of the small necessities of everyday life. I learned some characters too.
Most of them, I thought, were long gone. Apparently not all of them. And perhaps it is rather fitting that 人 was one of the first I recognised, because people have always been at the centre of my art.
Hong Kong never really left me
I first came to Hong Kong in the 1980s, when it was still under British rule. I would later experience Hong Kong both before and after the handover in 1997, and I spent time travelling in mainland China as well. Those years became part of me.
There are places you visit and remember, and then there are places that somehow become part of the way you see the world. For me, Hong Kong is one of those places.
I remember the energy first. Hong Kong could make other great cities feel strangely quiet. Life seemed to continue at every hour; you could be out in the middle of the night and the city was still awake. But what fascinated me most were the contrasts. Luxury shops and international brands could exist only a short distance from a simple local market. Glass, steel and enormous residential towers rose against green mountains. Crowded streets suddenly gave way to sea, islands and surprisingly beautiful landscapes.
And then there was the weather. The humidity that many people complained about was something I actually loved: the warm air, the dramatic thunderstorms, rain falling with almost impossible force, followed by brilliant sunshine as though nothing had happened. Hong Kong could change character in minutes. Perhaps that was part of what I loved about it.
A thousand illuminated lives
One memory has stayed particularly strongly with me: the windows.
At night, the residential towers of Hong Kong could become enormous walls of illuminated rectangles, and people didn’t always hide themselves away. Through those windows you caught fragments of lives: someone eating, someone watching television, someone walking across a room, a family at a table, a person alone.
You didn’t know who they were. You didn’t know what had happened before that moment or what would happen afterwards. You saw only a fragment. Years later, I realise how closely that resembles what I try to do in my paintings.
I rarely want to tell the entire story. I would rather open a window.
Hong Kong Neighbors
I even have an older acrylic painting that I have returned to working on. Its project title is Hong Kong Neighbors. The painting contains tall residential buildings, the mountains behind them and those many windows. Inside the windows, different things are happening: little lives and little stories, some visible and some hidden.
It isn’t intended as a postcard image of Hong Kong. It comes from something much more personal: the experience of looking across at another building at night and becoming aware of hundreds of human stories taking place simultaneously.
Perhaps that painting has been waiting for me to understand it properly. I don’t know yet whether it is finished. Paintings have an annoying habit of deciding such things for themselves.
The places inside a painting
My art today does not necessarily look Chinese. I am a Swedish artist, and my paintings have been shaped by many places, people and periods of my life. But I don’t think experience works in such a simple way.
We carry places with us. We carry faces whose names we have forgotten, conversations, smells, weather, rooms and streets. We carry people we met for five minutes and people we knew for years. Eventually some of it finds its way into what we create.
Perhaps it doesn’t appear as a Chinese building or a Hong Kong street. Perhaps it becomes a colour, a face, a sense of loneliness, humour in an unexpected place, a person standing slightly apart from everyone else, or a story in which we can see what is happening but never quite understand why.
That is much closer to the kind of figurative and narrative art I make today.
Coming back through language
And now, many years later, I find myself returning to Chinese in a completely unexpected way. I have been creating introductions to my art in different languages, allowing people from different parts of the world to encounter my work in words that feel a little closer to home.
I have now added a Traditional Chinese introduction to my art and work as a Swedish artist — 瑞典藝術家 Andy Renard 的藝術介紹.
It is not a translation of my entire website, but a Chinese doorway into my art — a place to discover my paintings, the stories behind them and something about the person who created them. And for me, choosing Traditional Chinese felt natural. It is the written Chinese I remember seeing around me in Hong Kong all those years ago.
Working with the text has produced small flashes of recognition: a character here, another one there, fragments coming back.
And then there was 人. Human being.
Of all the characters I could have remembered, perhaps that is the right one.
Because it was always about people
People keep returning in my paintings: the face, the body, the eyes. Love, loneliness, fear, sexuality, humour, vulnerability and all the strange situations human beings manage to create for themselves.
I paint figuratively, but I am rarely interested only in what a person looks like. I want to know what is happening behind the face. What happened five minutes earlier? What is about to happen? What is the person thinking that we cannot see?
Perhaps those illuminated Hong Kong windows taught me something long before I knew they were teaching me. You don’t need the entire story. Sometimes one glimpse is enough.
Will My Brush Take Me Back?
Today I paint in Sweden, far from the humid nights, mountains and illuminated towers of Hong Kong. But perhaps a painter never completely leaves the places that have become part of him. They have a habit of finding their way back onto the canvas, sometimes without asking permission.
My original paintings, art posters and Fine Art Prints can now be discovered from almost anywhere in the world. My art can travel to places even when I am not there myself. And yes — my art can find its way back to Hong Kong too.
There is something I like about that thought: a painting created in my studio in Sweden can cross the world and end up on a wall in a city that became part of my own story decades ago. Perhaps one day that will happen.
For now, I am simply happy that my website can speak to Hong Kong in its own written language — or at least that it is beginning to. My Cantonese, unfortunately, is going to need considerably more work.
But I still remember one character:
人
And perhaps that was the most important one for me to remember. Because after all these years, after all those countries, cities, paintings and stories, I am still painting the same endlessly complicated subject:
People.