I've Got the Blues
Siu ha heng jau dik yan
Gateway | Dragons & Tigers
One of the most original and fascinating documentaries to come out of Hong Kong in many years, Angie Chen’s portrait of Yank Wong (Wong Yan-kwai)—painter, blues musician, activist, cinema art director—is an HK rhapsody. Wong is one of Hong Kong’s preeminent abstract painters. His paintings vibrate with feelings and symbols, in brilliant primary colours. He abjures any kind of Hong Kong-style "marketizing" of his work: an ambitious mural decorates the progressive-bohemian Club 71 Bar in Central.
Chen, a close friend of Wong’s for many years, moves from HK to Macao (where Wong’s opening a gallery installation) to Paris tracing Wong’s art, his loves, his complex family, his feelings about creating at home and creating a home. Wong’s multi-dimensional art reveals a sometimes hidden Hong Kong: one infused with aesthetically and politically progressive artistic activity.
Remarkably, Chen and Wong go at each other in several energetic, powerful scenes that pit two absolutely vibrant, strong personalities against each other, when Wong questions Chen’s filmmaking tactics and motives, and ultimately even the possibility of making a documentary that can "capture" the life of such a complex, creative, vibrantly alive human being.
— Shelly Kraicer