Structure and Illusion: Josh Hon

It is a story of Josh Hon, a popular but largely unknown painter and performance artist working in Hong Kong in the 1980s. As part of a project commissioned by the Hong Kong Arts Centre in 2012, Leung compiled a list of local artists working since the late 1970s who were no longer active. He recalls, “I took the list to artists and curators who had been around over the last 30 years to see if they remembered any of the names. And Hon was the only one recognized immediately by all of them.” This roused Leung to not only investigate Hon’s legacy in the local art community, but also to search for the artist, who left Hong Kong in the 1990s during the exodus after events at Tiananmen in 1989 and before the 1997 handover of the British colony to the Chinese government.