Hung Fai has long stood out among post-1980 Hong Kong artists as a respectful, cool-headed rebel – a son who dissects his Chinese art inheritance with the precision of a surgeon.

For more than a decade, the artist has considered the weight of lineage, specifically that of his father, the ink master Hung Hoi.

Hung Fai’s practice has been defined by a carefully calibrated, conceptual rigour involving the use of soaked layers of xuan (rice paper), a ruler and ink pens that create works as much about the distance between generations as they are about their connection.

But at his latest solo exhibition, “A Veiled Revelation”, at Grotto Fine Art on Hong Kong Island, there is a sense of this calculated control unravelling.

This is felt most viscerally in Yearning (2025), for which Hung Fai commandeered the cinnabar for himself. Rather than wielding it with brushes or manipulating it with his usual pens and rulers, he applied the pigment using cotton buds, creating a feverish, mottled image that resembles a vertical landscape of trees and rocks. On closer inspection, the landscape looks more like bloody scratch marks.

Hung Fai says that the work was a mirror of a recent bout of eczema, a skin condition he had never suffered from before, made in the same dabbing motion he used to apply the lotion that brings temporary relief.