Grotto Fine Art takes great pleasure in presenting Joey Ka-yin LEUNG’s first one-woman exhibition, Cloudy Fairy Tales, since 2008. One of most accomplished Hong Kong artists, Leung’s paintings captivates the audience with its finely executed composition and profound interplay of text and images.  On display will be a body of works that represents the artist’s newest development in the past three years .

Words and images are cleverly juxtaposed in Joey Leung’s painting to create a sense of narration.  The manner in which they are combined both enhances and at times subverts their connoted meaning.  Surrealistic landscapes and mundane activities reflect the absurd, yet Leung’s figures hidden behind traditional blue-and-green mountains and endowed their gestures with metaphorical identification with current issues.  The influence of comics is obvious where inscriptions not only serve as a pictorial element but also points to a specific tone and theme.  The use of sequential structure gives Leung’s painting a complex narrative composition where the viewer can derive meanings out of text, images or both.  However, Leung’s work is beyond simple narrative painting.  Leung’s text is carefully composed and takes on the unique masculine rhyme and structure of the Cantonese language – one of the official languages of Hong Kong.  The choice of words is simple and concise.  In many cases, they remind us of childhood riddles and songs, and that evokes an innocent sentiment that complements her bizarre and whimsical figures. 

Born in Hong Kong, Joey Leung received her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Fine Arts in painting from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2000 and 2007.  She has exhibited extensively and won numerous awards leading to her professional status.  Leung is currently a full-time artist based in Hong Kong.