Happy Valentine's Day! (中文在後）
This is a painting inspired by a scene in Kowloon, Hong Kong many moons ago (1985). Kowloon's Mong Kok was not far away from my studio. Many first-run movies were usually shown there and most of the audience was made up of young people. In front of the movie theater were many hawkers selling snacks for the audience. The most common snacks were boiled corncob and pop corn. As I was fresh off the boat from Mainland China (Hong Kong at the time was a British colony and Mainland China in contrast was still recovering from the Cultural Revolution and just opened its door to the world), this was of novelty to me. I had never seen anyone sell snacks at the movies in China. People did not take snacks into the theater either because it was a bad habit of the "Old Society"! In Hong Kong, however, it was a natural cultural phenomenon. There was nothing strange about it and being "new" or "old" didn't matter at all.
I often saw young men and women flirting with each other at the entrance to the movie theater. It all felt very natural, warm, and touching. A boy and a girl eating a corn cob together naturally became the main image in my painting. So I made a sketch then asked a student to bring his girlfriend along as a model. The finished image was transplanted to a space near the ticket booth of the movie theater and the movie poster just happened to be of Saturday Night Fever.
情人節快樂！
這幅畫“熱玉米”是香港時期的創作。作於1985年。當時我在九龍開畫室謀生。離我的畫室不遠就是熱鬧的九龍旺角，那裡經常放映一些首輪電影，看電影的觀眾年青人居多。電影院前有許多小販出賣零食給觀眾，見得最多的就是水煮玉米和爆米花。因為剛從內地到香港不久，一切都還是很新奇。我在大陸內地看電影從來沒人出賣零食，更沒人帶零食進場呀，那是「舊社會」的不良習慣啊！可在香港，這是自然發生的文化現象，既不奇怪也無所謂"新舊"。
我在電影院門口常常看到青年男女的親熱動作，自然、親切、動人。男女共吃一個玉米的親密動作自然成為我畫中的主要形象。於是，我畫了草圖後請我的學生帶他的女朋友來作模特兒，最後完成的畫面移入電影院售票處附近的空間，櫉窗的劇情圖片介紹正是「周末狂熱」。
