When people think of Hong Kong, they tend to imagine rows of staggered skyscrapers, a glittering backdrop that has long inspired visual and other artists. But with approximately 75 percent of the territory classed as countryside – including 250 islands, 24 country parks, six marine parks, and a marine reserve – Hong Kong is as much nature as it is city. Even in the most urban districts, the roots of banyan trees cover walls and pavements, pushing in and out of concrete – a constant reminder of the land that pulsates underfoot. This enigmatic and palpable contrast has always offered a rich context for Hong Kong’s painters to play with.

It’s the natural world that Stephen Wong Chun Hei captures in his luminous paintings, bristling with fine brushwork and rippling forest hues, which often portray Hong Kong’s mountainscapes from which parts of the city seem to rise up like wheatgrass. After graduating from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), Wong began painting video-game screencaps like The Tree and Mountain (2008), an oil-on-canvas depiction of the titular scene from the perspective of a driver behind the wheel of a racing car. When the distance between reality and its digital rendering felt too great, he took to nature.

‘Every landscape or space I encounter leaves me with visual impressions and subjective interpretations – both of which feel “real” to me,’ Wong explains. ‘The best way to express these feelings is through painting.’ Wong creates preliminary drawings and then paints from memory, inspired by the commitment of artists such as John Constable and David Hockney to observing the world around them. He says hiking feels a lot like drawing, which is evident in his series ‘MacLehose Trail’ (2022) – more than 40 paintings documenting all 100 kilometers of Hong Kong’s longest hiking trail, named after the colonial governor who established it. Talking about the project, Wong has pointed out the pace of change that defines Hong Kong: ‘I don’t know what the landscape will look like in the future, or if the MacLehose Trail will still go by this name.’

Disappearance and forgetting are also concerns for Chow Chun Fai, another CUHK alumnus, and among the first wave of artists to move into the Fo Tan industrial area, where Wong also keeps a studio. Building on that connection in 2023 was Chow and Wong’s joint exhibition, ‘A Mirage of a Shining City,’ at Tang Contemporary Art. In the show, Wong turned his eye to Fo Tan – an area that, despite its context, is abundant with foliage, not to mention art history. Chow depicted moody downtown night scenes in his usual muted palette with characters from iconic movies painted in. Taxi Driver 1976, at Lower Ngau Tau Kok Estate 2009 (2023) shows Travis Bickle from Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) walking to a red Hong Kong taxi – a nod to Chow’s earlier series ‘Hong Kong Taxi’ (2003–2005), which started after he took over his father’s taxi license in 2001.

Chow continued his reflections on Hong Kong as an ever-changing city in his 2024 solo show ‘Map of Amnesia’ at Tang Contemporary Art. The two-meter-wide, acrylic on canvas As Tears Go By 1988 at Mahjong School Portland Street (2024) was named after a Wong Kar-wai movie and a site at the corner of Portland and Shandong Streets, which Chow painted once but couldn’t find when he returned some ten years later. The melancholy charging that loss connects with Chow’s best-known series, ‘Paintings on Movies’ (2007–ongoing), mostly defined by stills from Hong Kong films like Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s iconic Infernal Affairs (2002). Produced in the years preceding and immediately following colonial rule, these movies ran with bilingual subtitles, which Chow reproduces. In Infernal Affairs: ‘I want my identity back’ (2007), for instance, Tony Leung’s character, an undercover cop investigating the triads, sits on a ledge overlooking Victoria Harbour with the painting’s title rendered in subtitles below him.

‘Why are undercover cop thrillers such common subject matter in Hong Kong movies?’ Chow once asked me when discussing the realities of code-switching in a stratified colonial society. ‘It is because of our own identity; we are more than one-sided portrayals of cops or mafia. We are always both.’ Chow’s maximalist perspective resonates with Yeung Tong Lung’s large-scale realist paintings of daily life in Hong Kong, and its diverse cast of characters – particularly from the artist’s ‘3-Fold’ series (2024–ongoing). Compositions invert the colors in Yeung’s realist palette, such that the blue sky overlooking a crowd in 3-Fold. Photo (2024) is rendered orange. ‘These works use the technique of negative imagery to convey the multiplicity of the language of painting,’ Yeung explains. ‘They toy with the dichotomy between positive and negative, the realistic and the imagined.’

A self-taught artist, Yeung moved to Hong Kong in 1973 from Fujian, and co-founded Quart Society, one of Hong Kong’s first independent artist-run spaces, in 1990. He shifted from abstraction to figuration after his daughter was born in the late 1990s – he noticed her infant eyes following sources of light and decided to create images she could read. That act of reading charges Yeung’s compositions, where memory, observation, and imagination combine to create signposts to deeper meanings. Take the title of Whitty Street Fo Jeng (Gas Tank) Huǒ Jǐng (2023), showing a food delivery woman asking for directions. In 1934, a leaking gas tank on this street caused a massive explosion in which 42 people lost their lives, including an unnamed South Asian watchman, who died redirecting the leak to avoid further catastrophe. But the plaque that the community commissioned to commemorate the incident was removed due to redevelopment, which circles back to the impulse artists like Yeung have to paint Hong Kong. In many ways, theirs is an art of remembering – of illuminating things long gone.

Yeung Hok Tak is among those painters with a view to looking back. With a background as a comic artist, he has published nine graphic novels grappling with Hong Kong’s relationship with nostalgia, starting with his semi-autobiographical How blue was my valley (2002), which recalled the since-demolished Lam Tin Estate where he grew up. Citing Matisse and other Fauvists as key influences – ‘I love their bold and irrational use of colors… and most importantly their rebellious manner against traditions,’ he tells me – the artist’s paintings express a more brash, surrealistic, and eclectic approach to Hong Kong’s transformations, recombining elements from the city’s built and natural environments in psychedelic hues. In To Remove and Delete (2022), a cliff face marked for development has crosses on rocks destined for removal. While So You Are Here (2021) shows how the old Star Ferry Pier – a focal point of the 1966 protests against the colonial government, which was demolished by authorities in 2007 – has been turned into an island.

Long a symbol of Hong Kong’s can-do spirit, Lion Rock – a mountain peak cutting through the New Territories and Kowloon – recurs. Its spectral shape floats over the sea as two people on an empty promenade look at its watery reflection under a crescent moon in Crackling, Spluttering, Roaring (2022). In The Lion in Winter (2021), it appears as a glowing, isolated form crowned by a flurry of birds. Street Interview (2024) shows a forlorn young Yeung wearing a lion’s mane and tail, sitting on the street, and lamenting his inability to speak his native Chiu Chow dialect due to the dominance of Cantonese and English in school, as he explained in 2022 on the occasion of his first solo exhibition with Kiang Malingue.

The title of that show, ‘What a big smoke ring’, came from the artist misremembering the lyrics from William Fung Wai Lam’s 1981 hit ‘What a big web’ – which the exhibition statement described as ‘a laughable yet critical point of departure’ because it highlights how unstable memory can be. As it turns out, anyone can rewrite the past in the present, because things always change. Whether they focus on the fluidity of the natural world or the ephemeral nature of the urban environment, Hong Kong’s painters are playing with that freedom.