The last time Tao Hoi Chuen said to me, "I have an exhibition coming up, can you be my curator? It was in 2016. That time, he and another student found an exhibition at the New Asia Library. One of them loved soccer so much that he broke his cruciate ligaments, and the other loved boxing so much that he had a concussion. Tao painted some oil paintings about soccer and a video work about his unconscious shaking after knee surgery. We titled the exhibition Momentum, and I like to imagine that the exhibition had a driving force that was hard to stop once it started, and later on, following the physical inertia, they each went on to start their own businesses. Of course, that's another story.

This time, Tao Hoi Chuen came to me seven days ago, and all the works were ready, except for the layout of the space and an essay. I thought it would be good to put up a name. I said you have to let me write whatever I like. He agreed. So I'm going to talk about pop music, R&B in this piece. That's okay, I'm going to talk about something else, because Louis Cheung wrote a detailed analysis of his work in "Jacky Tao's Lunchtime: The Way of Narration and Expression with Space".

A pop singer-songwriter participated in a program and sang a R&B of someone else. The audience was surprised to find out that she was a great R&B singer. Then fans once again turned to her previous work to listen. "Isn't this Bruce? That's soul music there! Why didn't I notice it before?" It turns out that she has been hiding the most soulful part of her music, only occasionally revealing a hint of it. If you are not careful, people will overlook her talent because of her popularity. She said, "Pop music is something that should be hidden, not revealed. If you throw too much out there, the audience can't catch it. You have to draw them in a little bit. Once they're in, how can they get out?"

I made up the above story mainly for two reasons, one is that Tao Hoi Chuen has won several singing competitions in the past; the other is that I knew Tao Hoi Chuen when he was not popular, so I need to have such a story to help me explain his popularity. In my eyes, he is the pop singer.
Tao studied brush painting in Beijing and Taiwan. He is a solid artist who has not settled in the tradition and "wanders" through the art with his works. His art can enter other arts without staying too long, just like a butterfly will naturally fly after sitting for a long time. If the world of the ancients was as big as his, perhaps the ancients would have done the same.
One of his paintings depicts a crossroads where the figures appear repeatedly as if they were vestiges. Each time the figure appears, it fits the logic within the picture. The longer I look at that painting, the more I feel like "Kangxi's Southern Tour". Believe me, I watched it for eight hours a day for two weeks at two separate art fairs (though not voluntarily). That was the first time I discovered that Tao Hoi Chuen's paintings were deeply buried in the memories of his predecessors. It turns out that, following the art of others, Tao sometimes wanders back 400 or 500 years. When Tao will set up his studio, he wants to name it "Art of Travel", which is quite ingenious.
The first time I sold a painting for Tao Hoi Chuen was at an art fair in Taipei. He had a painting of a sleeping girl who was floating around. He painted the painting on silk, unframed, and rolled it on a wooden stick. During the opening speech of the guest of honor, the stick slipped slightly. I caught it before it fell and startled the guests. The painting was so light that I hung it back up without anyone noticing. The girl in the painting did not want to settle on the wall. A few days later, the painting went to a collector.
There was another work in that art fair, the Hong Kong racehorse champion, who "died on the field", and the ancient Chinese painting "Lady Guoguo's Spring Journey". At that time, Tao Hoi Chuen's painting was very straightforward: he wished the beloved racehorse had not died, so he painted him traveling back to the Tang Dynasty to play with his maids. For a while, he thought about the issue of life and death. In the face of life and death, reason and knowledge are powerless. Tao chose to use his paintings to respond to this sense of loss. I think the most special thing about him as an artist is his "sincerity" towards life. At that time, a family member of the collector had passed away, so he did not collect them immediately, but repeatedly thought about them for a year. The next year, when we went to Taiwan again, the collector bought the work.
At that time, Tao Hoi Chuen's works were so straightforward, but now it is hard to see them. As people grow up, they have different feelings about life. He was like a singer who only knew rhythm and blues, still studying blues scales, transposition and triplets taking away the middle beat of the shuffle, until the singer met "life" and people felt empathy for her music.

When we were students, we thought we had no life. All we did was wake up, eat, and create every day. What we had in our heads was foreign stuff, or a bunch of emotional stuff, and we didn't take the time to look at our real lives. Tao Hoi Chuen spent his undergraduate and graduate years at CUHK. Sailing with his professor, the building where his studio is located, and the cafeteria on race day ...... All of them can be included in the painting. As a graduate student, Tao Haisuan internalized the tradition of brush painting and faced "everyday life" with frankness.
I asked him why he never seemed to worry about "what to paint". He said, "I think about what to paint every day! I have all kinds of ideas in my head, and I'm just waiting for things to be painted. A person who can draw is an empty vessel. The street three years ago, the car trunk, the fencing competition last year... These are Tao Hoi Chuen's daily life. In the eyes of others, they only know it is fashionable; in my opinion, it is "rhythm and blues"; in Tao Hoi Chuen's eyes, it is the pattern of space. Since his figure paintings began to have a background, the design of the spatial composition has changed a lot. Tao has officially entered a new period.
The paintings cut up the life and the ideas at that time and stored them in the safe. When I look back at my daily life a few years later, I will find that my youthful years were still quite strange.
Another time I went to the art fair in Taiwan, the gallery arranged one of my staffs to go. Tao said he would come with us to help us install the works, so he came at his own expense. He didn't have a budget to stay in a hotel, so we slept with another artist in a room with only one bed. After the exhibition, we went to the National Taiwan University of Arts for a visit. On the bus, he took out a pen and paper and started sketching. He wanted to memorize everyone's face in just a few stops.
On the campus of National Taiwan University of Arts, he said he wanted to become a university professor and that he would have models to draw every day. A few years later, he may not remember. For those who remember, when they see him painting "Cheng Ming" this time, standing on the top of New Asia, with new buildings being built overhead, they know that there will be more life and more stories here.