Two liuli artists brought their Chinese crystal pieces to Hong Kong recently, sharing visions of a laid-back and peaceful life
Junior reporters Pearl Tin and Stanley Lam at the exhibition
Loretta Yang
Loretta Yang, an award-winning Taiwanese actress and professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, believes Hong Kong is a unique place where East meets West. That's what made it a good choice for the exhibition, she says. The city mirrors her own creative concept: embracing the unique and the new.
Three out of the five sections in the exhibition were created by Yang. In her work, Yang expresses her peaceful thoughts about life.
In her Enlightenment series, she used cold and complicated steel wires combined with liuli to show life's limits, even though the pieces generate a feeling of calm.
Buddhist figures and flowers have been the main themes of Yang's work for the past 25 years. To her, they show all of life's stages: birth, ageing, sickness, and death.
Yang's motto is to never give up. "Once you give up, then everything goes back to zero," she says. "You have to keep moving forward."
In creating art, there are different problems at different stages, she says. All artists can do is face them.
Pearl Tin
Chang Yi
To revive the ancient Chinese art of liuli, Chang Yi, who also teaches at Tsinghua University and is an award-winning Taiwanese director, writer and artist, channelled his creativity into modern liuli art and founded Liuligongfang with Yang in 1971.
"Over the past 25 years, Liuligongfang has branched out onto the world stage," says Chang. The pair's artworks have been displayed at some of the world's most famous museums, such as The Palace Museum in Beijing and the Victoria and Albert in Britain.
Among the five series displayed, Free Mind and A Realm of Zen Within Fire are Yi's creations. Both reflect the artist's laid-back nature, with Free Mind (which takes the form of Buddhist sculptures) keeping mistakes and imperfections in its pieces on purpose.
"[We have] an endless list of goals, and we will not stop until [we meet them]," says Chang of his and Yang's creative path.
Chang says his ideas come from observing all the details that he sees in everyday life.
For aspiring artists, he says, "the first step is finding your own language, so that your art can be created using that language as the medium".
Stanley Lam
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