Painting through the pandemic

By Shraddha Rajesh

While some of us have spent this pandemic on the couch, Renaissance College’s DP Visual Art students have painted away and produced pieces that provoke thought, inspire, and translate experiences through space and time. One could only imagine how different the process of creation was this year compared to the past. To better understand this process, we spoke to DP visual arts teacher, Stacey Leung. 

As a teacher, what were the obstacles you encountered when helping your students prepare for the exhibition through COVID?

The obstacles were the materials and the distance. In a normal class setting, I would be able to walk around the room and check in with every student, giving small suggestions throughout the lesson. However, during online learning, these types of conversations were not as easy since I could not always see what the students were working on. Since Diploma is such a free subject, in terms of what the students can explore, each student would be experimenting and creating with a different media. But due to working from home, some of the students were limited to the materials and size they could work on, which made it difficult, at times, to fully explore their ideas and intentions.

How did you overcome these obstacles?

We overcame these above obstacles by trying to find new ways to prepare the students for their exhibition. We knew that some students had access to studio spaces outside of school, so the actual space for making would happen on their own time, so instead, some of the class time was spent doing activities that would inspire their future exhibitions.

We got them to curate a dream exhibition that related to their own theme. The students used digital or 3D mediums to create an exhibition space, and then they could choose from all of the artists in the world 7-10 artworks that would create a cohesive exhibition. This allowed us to gain more exposure to new artists, and also start to think about what it takes to create a cohesive visual experience.

What set this year's exhibition apart? Why?

This might be confusing, but what set this year's exhibition apart from other years' exhibitions was that it wasn't different. I think anyone who has an understanding of what the past year and a half has been like would expect to walk into this year's art exhibition and see small scale, delicate pieces, that could be created in the small spaces of Hong Kong homes. They would expect colour pencil or tonal drawings, or they would expect A4/A3 sized paintings. This would be a reasonable expectation for an exhibition where the artists have spent the majority of time in their own homes. However, this exhibition was the complete opposite. We had works that were bigger than previous years. We had giant paintings, multi panelled wood paintings, installation works that required multiple different parts, and we had textile garments that were elaborate and ornate. The whole exhibition was a testament to the power of creativity, and demonstrated an unbelievable amount of resiliency and dedication from our artists. 

Take a peek: view all of the students’ extraordinary creations here.