Esther Chow

Esther Chow is a Hong Kong painter who works from life. She studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and came back to a city she has spent most of her life looking at closely. What she paints tends to be whatever is in front of her, treated with more attention than it usually gets.

Her food paintings are the ones people remember. Har gao. Char siu bao. Tong yuen. A plate of fried rice. Late night Hong Kong. She paints them large and straight on, in oil, with the seriousness you would expect of a portrait, and the effect is that a dish you have eaten a thousand times becomes strange and worth looking at again.

The flowers are looser. In the Language of Flowers series and her flower drawings, she lets colour do most of the talking, and the results feel closer to a record of a good afternoon than a botanical study.

Impressions of Mongolia came out of two summers spent painting on site, in the heat and the storms, around the Gun Galuut nature reserve and a children's summer camp in the countryside outside Ulaanbaatar. Thunderstorms building over open steppe. Moonlit huts. A girl washing at her ger in the evening sun. These are small paintings that hold a great deal.

Chow has shown in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Los Angeles, Chicago, Prague and Mongolia, and her work is in private and corporate collections on both sides of the Pacific. She also teaches, and has worked as an artist in residence in international schools in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Her larger public and outdoor projects can be found in Yuen Long, Pudong, and Roseville, California.

Everything we carry is a limited edition print, produced by the artist in Hong Kong on Hahnemühle fine art paper or canvas, hand numbered from small editions.