OLD MASTER Q: WHAT THE @#$% IS GOING ON?
Sotheby’s HK Gallery
Joseph Wong Chak remembers as a child running towards his father's laughter, to find him howling over his latest comic. "He would laugh like hell when he was drawing," he says about his father, Alfonso Wong Kar-hei, the creator of the beloved Old Master Q series.
"He's a comic genius," says Joseph, who helped curate a retrospective selling exhibition of his father's early work at Sotheby's Hong Kong Gallery. "When we went through all the drawings, every single piece was funny and well done," he says, describing his father's humour as a mix of Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy.
Alfonso was born in Tianjin in 1924 and studied Western art at Fu Jen Catholic University, which was then in Beijing. He moved to Hong Kong in 1956 and started drawing comic strips for several local newspapers under several aliases. Old Master Q was serialised in 1964 under his son's name and was well received. Joseph says most of his father's early works were thrown away, ruined or left in print shops after being published in newspapers or magazines. But he managed to dig out more than 120 original four- and six-frame comics and covers, from the 1960s to the '80s.
Gallery director Angelika Li On-ki says the show is "edgy" for Sotheby's. She adds that comics are an important genre in art and popular culture, and Old Master Q is "representative of Chinese culture, Chineseness and our identity". The comic is also popular among overseas Chinese in Thailand, Malaysia, the US and Britain.
Alfonso is ambidextrous and unique in that he used brush and ink while other comic artists used fountain or ballpoint pens. "There's a certain kind of magic that the medium has helped create," Li says. "It gives so much depth and different layers to the visual imagery on the paper, which a fountain pen could not achieve."
Alfonso is now retired and lives in the US, but he has not lost his sense of humour. "He's surprised that people take his doodling seriously," Joseph says.
Sotheby's Hong Kong Gallery, 5/F One Pacific Place, 88 Queensway, Admiralty, Monday-Friday, 10am-6pm; Saturday, 11am-5pm. Ends August 29. Inquiries: 2822 5566