East still red for Finnish artist

Totte Mannes (left) was captivated by Hong Kong life in 1968, when her sketches reflected pop art of the time. Photos Provided to China Daily

More than 40 years ago, Finnish artist Totte Mannes and her young family lived for a year in Hong Kong, perched "on the brink of a mountain on Victoria Island, in a beautiful, brilliantly designed flat".

The view from her work desk was fantastic: "Every day I followed with my eyes the ships that moved on the bay, and also how the light moved from one part of Kowloon to another."

On the horizon were the mountains of the mainland, the "nine dragons", she recalls with the same wistfulness that she felt at the time. Pining for the horizon is in her blood as her grandfather, Bernard Berg, was one of the last captains of big sailing ships.

Mannes would only get close to those mainland dragons once, before her husband's work recalled the family to Europe after a one-year sojourn in Asia. They've been comfortably settled in Madrid ever since, but suddenly China is calling again.

Mannes' recent oil paintings are part of a group show at Beijing's 798 Art Zone. If that's a success, she says, she hopes to return to Asia next year - when she'll be 80 - for a solo exhibition.

She spent her first few months in Hong Kong focused on Mexico, where she'd recently lived, writing a book that her publishers wanted for the following spring. Newly arrived in what was then the British colony, she says she felt irritated as an artist because "the first impression of a new place is most important".

"Only after finishing the Mexico book could I start writing and drawing pictures about Hong Kong, which I sent to two Finnish newspapers," she says. "I also designed dresses for a knitwear factory and some rattan furniture, and this was all excellently reproduced by good Chinese workers.

The "finest experience of that year", she says, was a trip to the mainland for the Canton Fair. Mannes savored every moment of a big theater show. "What choreography! What music! What illumination!" she exclaims, recalling the production as "sheer perfection everywhere".

"At night the lights went out, except for a big Mao face and the text on a red base that were brilliantly illuminated," she recalls. "The taxi drove without lights and tooted its horn at every street corner to avoid collisions. And the music - every morning we were awakened by loud music such as Dongfanghong (The East Is Red), which sounded from all the loudspeakers."

While her husband tended to business at the fair, Mannes and her 2-year-old son roamed the streets.

"When work time ended at 4 pm, a large group of bicycle riders came in front of us. When they saw my blond-haired son, they lost all control and the result was a massive bicycle collision."

"I bought Mao's 'red book' in English and Chinese," she remembers, as well as some small Chinese books about Kowloon's Walled City. She was fascinated by the artful calligraphy inside.

By the time the family resettled in Madrid in 1969, Mannes had written two books about her time in Latin America. She started to paint in 1972 and held her first exhibition in 1975. Many solo and group shows worldwide followed.

Her large paintings about Christopher Columbus were widely exhibited in 1992, the 500th anniversary of the discovery of America.

"Columbus is an embarrassing subject for 400 million people on both sides of the Atlantic," she says. "It makes the Spanish uneasy and the Latin Americans aggressive.

"I started my Columbus paintings because such a big part of my life has been intertwined with South America. I have lived there, I even have Latin American grandchildren.

"But I also wanted to exact a tiny revenge on the perceived superiority of the Spanish over the people from their former colonies. The Latin American landscape inspires my imagination: Nowhere else can you find such dramatic contrasts in climate and scenery."

Nowhere else? Who knows. The "nine dragons" remain vivid in this artist's ever-fertile mind, and as long as she can paint, anything could happen.

michaelpeters@chinadaily.com.cn