There are some surprisingly dark shadows in the life of Gavin Tu - yet the artist's best known for his serene Buddhist sculptures and paintings on silk. He's also the founder of interior design firm Collaborate, which created the Kee Club, The Glamour Room in Shanghai and the Hong Kong Fringe Club's Fotogalerie. The usually upbeat Tu is a well-liked figure in the local art scene.
Tu has another short exhibition, 'About Time', coming up next weekend. But as he kneels by a low coffee table in his modest basement flat in the Mid-Levels, he starts talking about a history most people don't know.
'I was one of the boat people, in a fishing boat of 11 metres with 80 people. It wasn't as terrifying as other people's stories,' he says. 'But by the 10th or 11th day, we didn't know where we were going. We were rescued by a Russian military boat and they directed us to Indonesia. They say [that] if we kept going, we would go to the Indian Ocean, which was the middle of nowhere.'
The story was news to Lydie Courtade, the Frenchwoman who is holding Tu's next show at her home in Stanley. 'You never talk about that,' she says.
After dodging a few questions, Tu says he was born in Saigon, the youngest of five children, after the end of the Vietnam war. The family ran a shop 'that sold pretty much everything'; but when Tu was about 13, his family were branded capitalists and forced to close their business.
Tu's eldest brother was able to escape by boat and made it to Melbourne while his younger brothers and sisters were left behind. 'We tried leaving so many times,' he says. 'You would go to someone's place, and there would be waiting, and nothing would happen, so you'd go home. Or, other times you would go to a boat and nothing would happen, so you'd go home.'