Hong Kong artist paints the mentally ill so people can better understand them
Retired Hong Kong psychiatric nurse Chu Hing-wah, exhibiting now at Hanart TZ Gallery, wants to use his experiences to battle misconceptions
Ninety-year-old retired psychiatric nurse Chu Hing-wah spent a third of his life training and working in hospitals. Witnessing the plight of psychiatric patients from 1963 to 1992 left him deeply touched and inspired a more than 60-year artistic practice, for which he is still creating art on Chinese xuan paper, in mixed media installations and for Cantonese opera.
Chu’s retrospective at Hong Kong’s Hanart TZ Gallery, “Happy 90th Birthday Uncle Chu!”, features more than 60 works spanning those six decades and is a celebration of the mostly self-taught artist’s personal and professional experiences, both in and outside the psychiatric ward.
When he graduated with his degree in general nursing in London in 1963, he discussed his next steps with the school dean, who had experience in psychiatry and knew that Chu often visited galleries and museums during his time off.
“She said, ‘You have so much interest in art, and now you have knowledge in general and surgical nursing [skills] to help patients with their external suffering, but do you know what’s going on in their heads?’
“I didn’t know. The doctor tells me to give them medicine and stitch them up – critical efforts but surface level. But psychiatry is about the human mind.”
Between 1963 and 1965, he studied a postgraduate programme in psychiatric nursing at London’s Maudsley Hospital.
