Beat Till It Blooms

Oil on pine panel, 30 x 84 x 1cm, 2019

I created this work in the summer of 2019 in response to the Yuen Long Attack incident on July 21; where passengers on the mass transit railway were indiscriminately attacked by a mob in white shirts with bamboo sticks. The perpetrators of the attack at Yuen Long Station claimed to punish the anti-extradition bill protesters.

The entirety of Hong Kong was shocked by this manifestation of organised crime. The police did not attempt to protect and serve the citizens- the victims.

The scenes of violently lashing and beating civilians aggravated me, and I felt the need to vent my emotions via my art. In my studio, I wielded a thin bamboo stick, squeezed tubes of oil paint directly onto dismantled cabinet panels (sourced from a friend in Yuen Long), and started lacerating the board, each stroke of the makeshift whip channeling my screams of vengeance. While lashing the oil paint, a Cantonese idiom “打到開花” , literally “Beat Till It Blooms”, where the lashing is so strong that the body bleeds, came to my mind. Thus, the form of the paintings shifted from abstract strokes to blossoms.