Spencer Luk

City landscapes like Hong Kong create beautiful playgrounds in capturing human behaviors in their everyday lives. Instead of having trees to act as props for a stage set, we have moving people who are constantly creating new exciting shapes and colour combinations. In 2005, Spencer started his studies of this fascinating city life from the Mass Transit Railway (MTR), where he found interesting human behaviors communicated through their body gestures and forms. From there he moved onto the streets where he found new silhouettes of machineries and more exaggerated human shapes in motion.

To further his research, Spencer started taking interest in the strong presence of all the images and messages our commercial media bombard us with in our everyday lives. Their colours and lines started to manifest into patterns within his art pieces.

Spencer’s inspiration comes from the alternating moment of elements in motion and at still; hustling and sluggish; a frozen moment and eternity. “When my subjects are on the move, time is of the essence. When my subjects are stationed, space is of the essence.”, says Spencer.

The art medium Spencer has chosen is directly related to the concept behind his inspiration. He uses the language of painting from the traditional 2D plane and introduces it again on elevated platforms achieved through woodwork, in creating 3D art works. He tries to isolate simple shapes of the busy city landscape from the positive and negative spaces within the world around us.