“Positions” Handmade Ink and Acrylic on mulberry/bamboo paper, 100 x 70cm, 2010

For this painting I looked at reference photos from Wanchai’s brothel district in the early 20th century. Women worked behind traditional wooden doors like this one. Each door had a big number on it, so they were called “Big Number Brothels”. Symbols painted on the lanterns were for good luck; you can see what looks like the number “8″ on two of them.

Ten years before I moved to Hong Kong I dreamt I lived there. I was standing on a promenade facing a smoggy maritime landscape of rolling islands and slapping sea. It was the ferry pier to my island home. I’d never particularly thought about Hong Kong before. But I had heard about Suzie Wong: the bad girl with a golden heart who’d seduced a lonely artist in a seedy Hong Kong hotel. I’d fondled polyester imitations of the Suzie Wong dress in NYC’s Canal Street. It’s a western fantasy ripe for ridicule by the likes of Margaret Cho and the ladies over at Disgrasian.com.

The story was so popular that it was turned into a film, and the transformations began: an artist changed from British to American for an American audience. The plot simplified. Suzie was played by Nancy Kwan – not a local girl, but a London ballet dancer with an English mother and Chinese father. Today the fantasy lives on, reincarnated worldwide: there’s a Suzie Wong girlie bar in Singapore with pole-dancers from the Philippines, others in Phuket and Beijing and Bangkok’s Soi Cowboy, an events service and bar in New York, even a restaurant in London called Suzie Wong’s.

Plenty of sailors and tourists still come to Hong Kong today and visit girlie bars in Wanchai, the notorious setting for the film. But you won’t find women from Hong Kong working there anymore. You’re more likely to hear accents from Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia.

Hong Kong women have higher levels of education and live longer than American women these days. The most formidable businesswomen I’ve ever met have Hong Kong roots. They’ve moved on up from the Suzie Wong days. Eventually, maybe our western attitudes will too.

“Missing [Apsara]“, Handmade Ink and Acrylic on mulberry/bamboo paper, 70 x 70cm, 2009

Part 1: “Missing [Apsara]“: Expensive Accessories
Part 2: “Missing [Apsara]“: Headless
Part 3: “Missing [Apsara]” Supple Status Symbols
Part 4: “Missing [Apsara]” Ramvong

He sat at my streetside table and ordered us a pair of BeerLaos. Looked older than his 40-odd years. Wiped the sweat from his pale forehead and frowned at the horde of daytrippers back from Angkor Wat. “How’s everything here in Siem Reap?” I asked. I was visiting from Korea to renew my visa and to see if I could start an art project in Cambodia.

“It’s good,” he said in his understated Canadian way. “You should meet my new girlfriend, she’s finished with school in an hour. She’s a lot of fun. I call her my Apsara, one of the temple’s celestial dancers. Her proportions are exactly like the sculptures at Angkor.” But is she your apsara, I wondered? What makes you think she belongs to you?

I moved there several months later. His girlfriend was twenty, vivacious and determined to find the right man. She was finishing high school thanks to tuition paid by her Canadian boyfriend, and received a stipend from an old French boyfriend – a BBC correspondent – living in Phnom Penh. Most of it went to her family, who appeared to expect it instead of a dowry; now that neighbors knew she’d had western boyfriends, her reputation was tarnished in every way.

We would go out for coffee and on photo shooting trips around World Heritage temples and in the stark Cambodian countryside. After she left my middle-aged english-teaching friend for a series of younger, handsome guys with better career prospects, she would tag along with me to a local French bar to find her next one.

Now she spends her time shuttling between Bangkok and Cambodia with her partner of the past four years. She’s moved on up from overweight English teachers to a handsome French hotelier who keeps his mistresses out of sight, if he has any.

It turns out she wasn’t his Apsara after all.

Detail of figure from “Missing [Apsara]“, Handmade Ink and Acrylic on mulberry/bamboo paper, 70 x 70cm, 2009

When I painted this shirt I painted Khmer script into the violet-and-gold pattern: “Ramvong” is graceful Cambodian dance, slow and sensual. You don’t need a local lover or partner to do it – everyone dances in a circle and smiles at foreigners who try. It’s easy to do badly and hard to do well. This Cambodian karaoke video will give you a taste of it.

Part 1: “Missing [Apsara]“: Expensive Accessories
Part 2: “Missing [Apsara]“: Headless
Part 3: “Missing [Apsara]” Supple Status Symbols
Part 5: “Missing [Apsara]” Sexpats I Have Known

Detail of figure from “Missing [Apsara]“, Handmade Ink and Acrylic on mulberry/bamboo paper, 70 x 70cm, 2009

Part 1: “Missing [Apsara]“: Expensive Accessories
Part 2: “Missing [Apsara]“: Headless
Part 4: “Missing [Apsara]” Ramvong
Part 5: “Missing [Apsara]” Sexpats I Have Known

Some of what I thought about while painting this mobile into a stylized hand:

* My first email “Sent from a Blackberry” came from a collector in Chicago nearly ten years ago

* Blackberries arrived in Cambodia this year. The young Khmer elite who use them continue to corrupt the country as efficiently as their parents and prime minister have, closing deals in rooms with high ceilings, polished tile floors, and flanked by showy bodyguards with Kalashnikovs

* The court dancers’ hands molded from a young age into supple arabesques, then carved into bas reliefs at Angkor and elsewhere. See more about a fascinating Khmer dancer here from the editor for my first contribution to ThingsAsian Press – essays for To Cambodia with Love: a Travel Guide for the Connoisseur

Detail of headless stone apsara from “Missing [Apsara]“, Handmade Ink and Acrylic on mulberry/bamboo paper, 70 x 70cm, 2009

Part 1: “Missing [Apsara]” Expensive Accessories
Part 3: “Missing [Apsara]” Supple Status Symbols
Part 4: “Missing [Apsara]” Ramvong
Part 5: “Missing [Apsara]” Sexpats I Have Known

As I painted this dancer modeled after the thousands carved onto walls of the ancient city of Angkor Thom – some of which have had their faces hacked off for art smugglers – I thought of a few things:

* Of the heritage Cambodia loses every year because they can’t police their World Heritage sites like Angkor Wat

* How it’s more difficult to let the history of pencil strokes show beneath paint than it is to get rid of them and destroy the paper’s surface

* How often I was told – and slapped – to shut my mouth when disagreeing with elders. (Now when people don’t like what I have to say, they smile and change the subject)

Detail of “Missing [Apsara]“: Handmade Ink and Acrylic on mulberry/bamboo paper, 70 x 70cm, 2009

Part 2: “Missing [Apsara]“: Headless
Part 3: “Missing [Apsara]” Supple Status Symbols
Part 4: “Missing [Apsara]” Ramvong
Part 5: “Missing [Apsara]” Sexpats I Have Known

While I painted these tools women use to heighten their features, I thought of several things:

* How Khmer Rouge cadres dressed identically, but the number of ballpoint pens in their pockets indicated their rank

* Women who appraise other women based on the variety and expense of their makeup tubes

* Women the world over who paint our faces and prefer them that way

* Men the world over who don’t like the taste of lipstick

* Sundry toxins in traditional dyes and makeup – like lead and other heavy metals – that slide on the skin like butter [same goes for lead paint onto a canvas]

* Cosmetic companies who make billions out of encouraging women’s anxiety about life-and-death issues like large pores and undereye circles [the west], or freckles & dark skin [Asia/elsewhere], and especially the size of one’s thighs [anywhere wealthy enough to afford an expensive diet program]

Reluctant pose with my mural before rushing to the Macau ferry

I’ve just returned to Sydney from five fun and frenetic days in my favorite Chinese city: Hong Kong, and launched my latest collaborative project with ThingsAsian Press, the photo book Lost & Found: HK. I was also invited to contribute to a mural for the DETOUR creative festival. The festival was held in an unusual venue: the run-down barracks for families of local police officers. Some of these tiny apartments still have traces of the families who lived there. Haunted decrepit buildings? That’s my kind of place.

I painted my section with golden lettering that blazes from a rich red background: “PEACE = HARD WORK”.  Haraya is a Hong Kong-based group of Filipino painters and media artists I’ve met through the Mural Society. The recent journalist massacres in Maguindanao were on all our minds. I thought of how difficult peace is to achieve between countries, and of the 20th century de facto American colonization of the Philippines. And of how rare peace is within homes, within ourselves. Most of all, I thought of how I best find my own peace: by working day and night for a creative goal.

Looking up at the highrises surrounding us at the police barracks, I decided to paint illuminated buildings of Hong Kong at night. Tower blocks were a favorite subject of my painting students in Hong Kong, and the dominant feature of their daily landscape.

The Haraya artists hard at work painting their way through the weekend. More photos of the mural-painting and DETOUR  installations here.