Opinion | The Hong Kong POWs who took to sketching and painting in camp

While this specific factor is usually overlooked, the unexpected gift of abundant spare time – essential to any creative endeavour – allowed unexpected creative energies to flourish.

Along with an astonishing array of special-interest lectures, amateur theatrical performances and musical productions, individual drawing, sketching and painting activities were also encouraged – or at least, not actively prohibited – by the Japanese.

Output varied sharply; pen-and-pencil, caricature-style drawings predominated – maintaining a sense of humour was vital in trying conditions.

80-year riddle of Hong Kong tycoon Paul Chater’s missing art

Food was almost always deplorable; rare occasions when special event meals occurred provided inspiration for illustrated or illuminated commemorative menus and souvenir cards, which were made to mark the day. Concert programmes and theatrical set designs were also produced.

Marciano “Naneli” Baptista and Alfonso Orlando Barretto were both local Portuguese. Baptista hailed from an artistic family; one 19th century forebear had been a student of British artist George Chinnery in 1830s Macau – fellow internees habitually referred to “Naneli” as “Artista Baptista”.

Barretto drew his pencil portraits of fellow internees on a pad of Japanese-issued camp letterhead paper; years later, they were disassembled and mounted on card.

A portrait painted by Alfonso Barretto after the war. Photo: D’Almada Barretto Collection

In 2015, digital versions of these sketches were displayed as part of a lecture at Club Lusitano, in Central, which movingly brought images of these men, and their half-starved wartime condition, back to life for the first time since Hong Kong’s liberation from the Japanese.

Eurasian Nicholas “Nick” Jaffer obtained a set of Faber-Castell pastels and pencils, which were eked out throughout internment. White Russian architect A. V. Skvorzov’s technical skills saw him portray camp huts and their interiors.

A privately printed post-war folio sketchbook was produced; later expanded to include other sketches, this was published in 2005 as Hong Kong Prisoner Of War Camp Life 25 December, 1941 – 30 August, 1945.

How the Hong Kong School of painting evolved after the Pacific war

Many local Portuguese and Eurasian members of the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps (HKVDC) had wives or other family members who were not interned, and who could obtain art supplies.

Lead and coloured pencils, and watercolours and Chinese brushes, were available in limited quantities throughout the war for those POWs with adequate financial resources.

By 1944, as the tides of war turned steadily against the Japanese, and merchant shipping was sunk in larger numbers, such imported items had become vanishingly scarce and prohibitively expensive.

Some continued their creative pursuits into peacetime. But for most, their prison-camp years remained the only period in their lives with adequate free time and space to create; post-war jobs and family commitments soon pushed their brief artistic flowering into the background.

Uniquely, Barretto’s art evolved from prison-camp pencil sketches to stylised oil portraits, New Territories landscapes and complicated abstract works, but a promising artistic career, which included solo exhibitions, was sadly cut short by his untimely death in 1963, aged 50.

Alfonso Barretto works on a canvas in 1957 as two of his sisters look on. Photo: D’Almada Barretto Collection

For the other wartime artists, as the years went on, a bundle of yellowing sketches drawn on camp letterhead paper, kept safely tucked away in a desk drawer, or a few brightly coloured sketchbooks brought out from time to time as conversation pieces at camp reunions, were all that marked this brief explosion of long-ago creative endeavour.

In the course of time, some artworks were donated to museums here and else­where; Britain, Canada and Australia are the main archival repositories of the city’s POW camp artwork outside Hong Kong.

Logo-favicon

Sign up to receive the latest local, national & international Criminal Justice News in your inbox, everyday.

We don’t spam! Read our [link]privacy policy[/link] for more info.

Sign up today to receive the latest local, national & international Criminal Justice News in your inbox, everyday.

We don’t spam! Read our privacy policy for more info.

This post was originally published on this site be sure to check out more of their content.