Boat People

Inscribed: Burning sun in the sky, looking forward to a hopeful future. Drafted in 1979, finished in 1980. Fang Zhaoling.

During the late 1970s thousands of refugees from Vietnam found their way to Hong Kong on crowded and ill-equipped boats. These "boat people" were not always welcomed, and their presence became a major issue for the people and government of Hong Kong. Fang Zhaoling expressed her sympathy for the boat people in a number of works created in 1979 and 1980. Her brief inscription here gives a sense of the people's plight and their hopes. By the late 1970s Fang had developed a characteristic style of depicting people, in both her landscapes and her figure paintings. As with the oarmen here, often she painted her figures disproportionately large and in an intentionally naive and awkward fashion.