About Tong King Sum...

I knew this local sculptor long before I started painting. It was the days when my dad brought me to City Hall for exhibitions and visiting the old venue of the Hong Kong Museum of Art at 10/F of High Block nearly once every few months. I still remembered the fantastic exhibition of Choi Man Wing (蔡文穎的動感藝術). And then I saw Tong's wooden sculptures in Lower Block of City Hall, the fantastic bodies made by wood. In those old days, a little girl like me could only ask her dad, "Oh, how come the body just lying there with half trunk?" I did not know the name of the sculptors until my study of art in secondary school and then college. I no longer went exhibition with dad, as I knew the ways already. But I really met Tong first face to face was a talk in my college and he was the guest speaker talking about his own works. And then we met few times in the gathering of HKVAS. He was a little man of great heart in art. We knew that his health was not very good in recent years, but his love on human body makes me moved all the time. I always introduce this artist to my students by one of his work known as "Back" (collected by H.K. Museum of Art). "As you see, this work consists of the trunk of a male, strong and spontaneous. From one side, we see the body bend backwards as if he is going to throw a disc out like the Olympic game player, if we are expecting to see his chest on the other side, we are wrong. What we see on the other side is a back again! And this back looks like he is thinking, like the "Thinker" of Rodin. So, what makes an artist has such kind of love towards the "back"? As we know, Tong suffers from some problems with the bones of his chest and spine, making him unable to own a full-formed trunk like the one standing in front of us. That's why..." Most of the time, when I finished the last few words in this introduction, students got new eyes on this sculpture, not only the artform but also the life of the sculpture. It's his works that call our attention to the most familiar but likely-to-be forgotten bodies.



(the above notification is adopted from Leung Po Shan's article in http://www.inmediahk.net/public/)