A visual representation of "City" by Louise Ho
CHIN Chi Lam Gianna
Diocesan Girls’ School
Ever since I was a teenager, I have been astonished by the unrelenting divergence of the mortal coil.
It is to my deepest impression that countless aspects are left unveiled behind whatever is being shown under the spotlight.
As dazzling lights and rumbling traffic noises over the vivacious city become the great masks of the underground living, thousands of unregistered street sleepers remain silent.
Those who seem to be the hopeless outcasts of a society have once been the bare roots of society at its starting point.
My work is deeply inspired by the poem ‘City’ by Louise Ho, as it further engraved the merciless, agonising aspect of the life of the neglected individuals in my mind.
My work was done by computer, with the drawing consisting of 90 layers. The process includes the base sketch, value establishment, application of the base colour, lighting adjustment and detailed rendering as well as the application of lighting effects.
Through the contrast of a grid of busy traffic lights with the dim light that casts over the homeless elderly man’s shadow, I hope to bring the homeless man in the poem to life and spotlight — to convey his pain of being neglected when he opens his palm towards the people of the city.
City
No fingers claw at the bronze gauze
Of a Hong Kong December dusk,
Only a maze of criss-crossing feet
That enmeshes the city
In a merciless grid.
Between many lanes
Of traffic, the street-sleeper
Carves out his island home.
Or under the thundering fly-over,
Another makes his own peace of mind.
Under the staircase,
By the public lavatory,
A man entirely unto himself
Lifts his hand
And opens his palm.
His digits
Do not rend the air,
They merely touch
As pain does, effortlessly.
Louise Ho
“City” was published in Incense Tree: Collected Poems of Louise Ho by Louise Ho, p.45. Copyrights © 2009 by Hong Kong University Press.