Hong Kong–based painter Tiffany Chan creates work that navigates the delicate tension between inheritance and liberation, tradition and innovation, personal grief and collective memory. 

Through her practice, she asks whether painting—an ancient and slow medium—can still hold its ground in a rapidly digitized world. For her, the answer is a resolute yes.

Tiffany recalls her earliest memory of painting not as the creation of an image, but as the creation of a space for dialogue. 

As a child, she found profound freedom in expressing complex emotions through color and texture—something no other activity could offer. 

Although she experimented with photography, installation, and body art during her education, she ultimately returned to painting, drawn to the medium’s paradox: its deep tradition yet pressing relevance to contemporary questions.  

shovel conduct an in depth interview with Tiffany to get to know her better 

Interview Questions for a Hong Kong Painter Tiffany

1. Can you tell us about your earliest memory of making art and how that moment shaped your path as a painter? My path was shaped by a realization I had as a child: that painting was less about creating an image and more about creating a space for dialogue.

My earliest memory is of the profound freedom I found in being able to express complex feelings through colour and texture—a freedom I couldn't find anywhere else. It was a private world without boundaries.

This early need for authentic expression is why, despite extensively studying and experimenting with photography, installation, and body art throughout my education, I committed to painting.

It’s the oldest and most traditional method I tried, yet it poses the most contemporary question I care about: how can a slow, material practice hold its ground in a digital, rapidly evolving world? This tension is central to my work.

It makes me ask: can this ancient medium not just remain relevant, but offer something unique that faster, newer forms cannot? For me, the answer is yes. Painting is the carrier of my soul and a vessel for collective memory; it’s the medium where my most authentic self meets the world.

2. How has living in Hong Kong influenced your artistic vision and the themes you explore in your work?

Hong Kong is my primary muse. Its specific context—a semi-island territory with a complex colonial inheritance and a layered class structure—provides an endless source of material. The city isn't a monolith; it's a collection of colliding worlds.

This collision is central to my work.

The cultural relics next to skyscrapers, the luxury apartments overlooking aging tenements—these juxtapositions naturally lead me to explore themes of hierarchy, power, and the social landscape. Living here makes you acutely aware of these invisible boundaries. My art is a way to investigate what happens in these spaces of overlap and conflict. The city’s constrained geography means these tensions are always visible, always felt, and that's what makes it such a stimulating place to create art from.

3. Your paintings often reflect both personal and cultural narratives. What stories do you feel most compelled to tell through your art?

I feel most compelled to tell stories about inheritance and liberation.

My work often begins with inherited objects—relics and photographs that carry historical memories and contradictions that aren't my own. Initially, this burden felt exhausting, being forced to accept a world created by others.

My painting process is my way of questioning that weight. Through layering, retracing, and erasing, I explore a sense of nihilism, deliberately stripping away imposed meanings.

I'm fascinated by the elusive, symbolic orders I find in old artifacts, often using animal imagery to evoke a sense of mystery.

Ultimately, the story I tell is one of conscious ambiguity. I reject rigid authority and societal conventions, questioning whether we can live without prescribed meaning. My paintings aren't meant to provide answers but to create a space for questioning, allowing for a liberation from inherited narratives.

4. In a city known for its rapid pace and constant transformation, how do you find inspiration and stillness for painting?

I think it's about building a life that allows for both. Hong Kong's rapid energy is a source of inspiration—it puts me in touch with incredibly diverse people and ideas through my model work and travels.

I find narratives everywhere, from the big picture down to the most personal, inner philosophies. But to process that inspiration, I need stillness, which I create deliberately.

I'm fortunate to have a lifestyle that isn't a traditional 9-to-5, and I fill that space with slow, mindful habits. Meditation and calligraphy are my anchors.

They ensure I'm not easily swayed by external pressures.

Most importantly, I find profound quiet in art museums. Being there is like time traveling; having a dialogue with artists from different eras in that shared space is the perfect counterbalance to the city's transformation and provides the clarity I need to paint.

5. Which artists—local or international—have had the strongest impact on your practice?

I'm more influenced by eras and movements than by individual artists. My inspirations are incredibly broad. I'll study everything from Mughal miniatures to cave art with equal interest.

While I deeply appreciate the work of many artists, I'm very protective of my own voice. I see something I admire.

I might absorb a technical approach or a compositional idea, but it always gets filtered through my own practice and transformed into something that serves my narrative.

My goal has always been to build my own thing, so my references are wide but my adaptations are very selective.

6. Do you see your work as primarily personal expression, social commentary, or a blend of both?

I absolutely see it as a fusion. The social commentary provides the essential questions, while the personal expression is my method of interrogation.

My art is fundamentally rooted in challenging external structures—authority, morality, and societal control—which is an act of social commentary. But the impulse to do that comes from a very personal place: a desire to explore meaninglessness and reclaim autonomy.

The technique I use, obscuring specifics and maintaining ambiguity, is my way of blending the two. It allows the personal to become universal and the commentary to become a conversation rather than a statement. This is a central thread in my practice that I intend to keep unraveling in new ways.

7. Hong Kong has a complex identity, shaped by East and West. How does this cultural intersection appear in your art?

My practice examines Hong Kong’s layered identity through the economy of the contemporary image—particularly the migration and mutation of symbols across time and cultures, a process vastly accelerated by digital circulation.

When I study sources like Dunhuang cave paintings or Mughal miniatures, I am examining what might be called the “source code” of visual culture: tracing how a single symbol—a lion, for instance—could function as a sacred emblem in one context, a trophy of imperial power in another, and now often circulates as a decontextualized, floating signifier in the endless flow of online imagery.

In response, my work engages in a kind of semiotic hacking: I appropriate, layer, and erase these symbols not to recover lost meanings, but to expose and alter the ways meaning is constructed and dissolved. The canvas becomes a site of intentional glitches and collisions—a visual analogy for the experience of constructing identity amid a constant barrage of dehistoricized, recombinant images.

I am interested in how these fractures reflect and inform the complex condition of contemporary consciousness.

 8. Could you describe your creative process, from the first spark of an idea to the finished canvas?

My creative process begins with inheritance, both literal and emotional.

The passing of my parents left me with a universe of relics, burdened by memories and histories not my own.

This confrontation with loss became the spark, provoking a deep inquiry into meaninglessness and the weight of the past. I start by organizing these inherited objects and my photographs from historical sites, constructing a surrealist collage.

This acts as my subconscious blueprint, combining East and Southeast Asian iconography with personal symbols to explore classism and authority.

On the linen, I paint with oil, a medium suited for my method of layering, retracing, and erasing. This physical act is a form of processing—a way to remove the "burden of meaning" from images and to resist fixed narratives.

The painting evolves into a dreamlike dimension where tangible and intangible elements collide. Figures and symbols, like the eyes of authority on a carousel, emerge from an internal dialogue between my memories, daydreams, and cultural research.

I consciously obscure specifics to maintain ambiguity, allowing the work to exist between reality and the unconscious.

Ultimately, my process is an exorcism and an excavation. It translates personal grief into a philosophical exploration of power and memory, using the canvas as a space where Freud’s inner reality and Breton’s automated fantasy converge to challenge perceptions of the world we think we know.

9. Many painters wrestle with the balance between tradition and innovation. How do you navigate that tension in your own work?

My navigation of tradition and innovation is less a struggle and more the core dynamic of my practice.

I engage deeply with traditional methods—mastering oil on linen, studying art historical techniques from Old Masters to Mughal miniatures, and drawing from Eastern philosophies like Taoism.

This foundation provides the technical and conceptual "tradition." However, my application of these traditions is where innovation occurs. I use these classical skills not to depict traditional scenes, but to deconstruct them.

My process of layering and erasing paint is a physical metaphor for questioning inherited narratives, much like one would challenge historical or personal dogma. The innovation lies in the intent: to strip symbols of their "meaning burden" and create new, ambiguous assemblages that speak to contemporary issues of power, class, and identity. Thus, the traditional medium becomes the vehicle for a radically innovative inquiry.

The tension is not something I resolve; it is the very energy that fuels the work, allowing me to use the weight of the past to critique the present and imagine new possibilities.

10. What role does color and texture play in conveying emotion in your paintings?

Color and texture are the primary vehicles for emotion in my work. I use color not descriptively, but psychologically. Muted, earthy tones often evoke the weight of history and memory, while sudden, vibrant hues can rupture that surface, suggesting moments of surreal clarity or unresolved tension.

This chromatic tension mirrors the emotional complexity of processing inherited pasts. Texture is equally vital.

My process of layering, scraping, and repainting is physically embedded in the canvas.

The resulting texture is a record of that emotional labor—a tactile history of construction and erasure.

A smooth, glazed area might suggest a moment of calm acceptance, while a thick, impastoed section, scarred with marks, conveys struggle and the relentless questioning at the heart of my practice.

Together, they create a visual and tactile language that communicates feelings before the viewer even deciphers the subject.

11. How do you see the role of artists in Hong Kong today, given the city’s social and political climate?

The role of the artist in Hong Kong is to be a careful observer and a guardian of nuanced expression. In a climate of rapid change and intense pressure, art provides an essential space for ambiguity and introspection.

It is not always about direct commentary, but about creating work that reflects the city's complex psyche—its layers of history, its anxieties, and its resilient spirit.

My role, as I see it, is to channel this energy into my exploration of memory and power. By creating symbolic, often obscure narratives, I can ask difficult questions about authority, identity, and collective memory without resorting to literal statements.

In this way, art becomes a sanctuary for critical thought and a mirror held up to the city's soul, encouraging viewers to reflect on their own position within these complex social structures.

12. Has the global art market influenced the way you create, or do you consciously try to keep your work independent from such pressures?

I consciously maintain a firm independence from the pressures of the art market.

My work is born from a deeply personal, philosophical inquiry into inheritance and meaning, and compromising that vision for market trends would fundamentally undermine its authenticity.

However, I am aware of the market. This awareness isn't an influence but a reinforcement of my need to protect my creative process.

The market's preference for the easily categorized or the instantly recognizable is precisely what my work challenges.

I create from a place of introspection and research, not production for consumption. This independence is crucial for me to remain honest to the questions I am driven to ask on the canvas.

13. What has been the most challenging period in your artistic journey, and how did you overcome it?

The most challenging period was undoubtedly the loss of my parents.

The emotional weight was paralyzing, and the physical task of managing their legacy of objects felt overwhelming. For a time, I couldn't create at all. I overcame it by eventually allowing that grief to become the subject of my work.

The exhaustion and the "meaning burden" of their relics ceased to be a barrier and became the central theme.

The artistic process itself—the physical act of painting, layering, and erasing—became my method of processing.

Transforming personal trauma into a philosophical investigation gave me a path forward. It taught me that art is not separate from life but a vital tool for navigating it, and that the most challenging experiences can become the most profound source of creative fuel.

14. Looking ahead, what themes or directions do you hope to explore in your future work?

Also, under the overarching theme of confronting social norms and authorities, my work consistently seeks to dismantle the frameworks that shape identity and perception.

My new series continues this critical investigation but shifts the focus inward, using my personal experiences in the modeling industry as a specific case study.

Looking ahead, I plan to launch a new body of work that draws directly from my personal experiences within the modeling industry.

This new series is a philosophical inquiry into the constructed self, aiming to deconstruct the very concept of what a ‘model’ is—both as an idealized form (‘model form’) and an assigned identity (‘model ID’).

While my previous work has been described as having an ‘oriental feeling’—a term I engage with critically—this project will confront the mechanics of perception itself.

I will use the visual language of fashion and portraiture to investigate the authorities (Foucault’s power structures, societal gazes) that dictate these idealized images.

The ‘miraculous’ and ‘glamorous’ surface becomes a facade that I construct and deconstruct to explore the alienation (in the Marxian and existential sense) that occurs when the self is objectified and refracted through an external, oppressive lens.

This work is not about providing answers but about creating a phenomenological stage.