Evergreen Beauty

Since the early 2000s, Yeung Tong Lung has painted ordinary lives in Hong Kong by juxtaposing reality and fiction, memory and observation. As important as the social documentation of urban stories in his pictures are the delicately rendered interior spaces framed through disjunctive perspectives that evoke nostalgia for the colonial Chinese city. Evergreen Beauty depicts an old-fashioned ground-floor hair salon in Hong Kong’s State Theatre shopping arcade. Through the glass storefront, we see a mixed-race woman holding an infant in the middle of the shop, her gaze averted; a man is slouched on the floor to her right. The 1970s era green floor tiles set the stage for the action figures on a shelf and movie poster on the shopfront glass that represent Hong Kong’s bygone industries and popular culture, as well as Yeung’s former career as a commercial painter. Behind the woman, a staircase leads to the upper floor, framing a backdoor passage to another part of the arcade where a Google Streetview operator walks by the Evergreen Beauty barbershop, whose Chinese and English sign is partially visible. At the lower left, reproductions of Pieter Jansz Saenredam’s church interiors allude to Yeung’s fascination with the Dutch painter’s explorations of perspective and proportion. The work itself is a metaphor for the history of painting through the act of looking as the cleverly constructed interior and lines of vision between the woman, the idle man, the gig worker, and the Google device bring together diverse viewpoints from Hong Kong to the larger narrative of global art history.