To Become Bodhisattvas to Each Other
NFT book news
The Bodhisattva stories serialized on DKC in Translation are already published as Bodhisattva 18 in NFT book form. It is a bilingual book (Chinese original and English translation), with 18 illustrations by Ian Leong.
NFT ebook + Limited printed illustrations (available only in Hong Kong and Taiwan) USD 30
NFT ebook USD 16
For more information and purchase, please visit dungfookei.com
Afterword: To Become Bodhisattvas to Each Other
In early 2005, I was teaching a course on Hong Kong Literature appreciation at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. In the class, there was a small, slim girl who always sat in the last row. By the middle of the semester, she came up to me during a break and asked where she could buy Visible Cities. I told her that the book was out of print. In the next class, I brought a copy for her. It turned out she was not a student at CUHK; she was studying design at PolyU but was also interested in writing and came to sit in the class every week. This girl was Ian Leong.
I did not particularly encourage her to write, not because her writing was bad, but because she was more of a visual person, and drawing was more suitable for her. After graduating, she worked in film art and props production, having a decent income and room for development, but this was not her aspiration. Later on, she got married, and then she had a daughter. Her daughter is now six years old. After becoming a mother, she did not give up drawing; instead, she explored it anew, honed her skills, and elevated her art. At this stage of her life, painting is no longer driven by desire, nor by concerns with gains or losses, and not even by purpose; she creates purely and naturally. She has finally entered the realm of art.
The earliest collaboration with Ian Leong was in 2006 when I wrote a play for young actors, Cosmic Comics, for the On & On Theatre Workshop. The idea came from Calvino's novel of the same name. I asked Ian Leong to create illustrations for the performance. She has since discarded those drawings, thinking they were not good. I couldn't find any records either, only some background projections visible in stage photos.
For a while, Ian Leong found it hard to find creative inspiration, so I gave her my short stories to illustrate. Later, my “V City Series” was published by Linking Publishing in Taiwan, and the illustrations for Unnatural Recollections were her practice works. (For the same series, Atlas, The Catalog, and Visible Cities each had illustrations by three different young Hong Kong illustrators.) Initially, I did not ask her to create an illustration for each story because the publisher paid a meager fee, but she ended up drawing all seventy-seven illustrations, showing her intense creative impulse. The themes of these illustrations were mostly natural flora and fauna, using black ink fine-line or sketching techniques, paying special attention to symmetrical and balanced patterns while also echoing the surreal imagination in the stories.
In 2014, before publishing the final installment of my Natural History Trilogy, I released a pivotal small book titled Virtue, which sketched out the main content and characters of the last part, like a movie trailer. This time, Ian Leong drew forty-seven illustrations, including solo portraits, pairs, trios, and groups of up to seven or eight people, covering nearly one hundred characters in the book. This breakthrough involved not only portraiture but also the use of color and the integration of characters with living scenes, as well as the fusion of imagination and realism. The final part of the trilogy was never finished, so Virtue became the last glimpse of this uncompleted novel.
In 2015, after completing my novel Kokoro (Heart), I wrote eleven Bodhisattva stories. The initial idea was to collaborate with Ian Leong on an illustrated book. She found narrative drawing challenging and later decided to create one illustration per story. However, she seemed to hit a creative block or experienced significant life changes, and it took her eight years to start. Eventually, she relearned painting and found a new creative direction, finally completing the first piece, “Ice Bodhisattva,” last year. At the same time, I wrote seven new stories, totaling eighteen. In these eighteen gouache paintings, Ian Leong displays a completely different style, using colors to drive lines and composition, capturing rich and subtle emotions and atmospheres. The most resonant aspect with the stories is not the objects or facts but the transformation theme presented through the illusive fluidity of colors. She fully understands that the so-called “Bodhisattva” does not refer to a specific deity but to the phenomena of “impermanence,” “non-self,” and “interactions of causes and conditions.”
In the beginning, Ian Leong asked me about writing, but I never taught her anything, and she never called me teacher. We have always been companions in artistic creation. In terms of painting and visual arts, she has given me a lot of inspiration. I remember a time when she rented an old building unit in Causeway Bay as a studio and worked as a waitress in a nearby upstairs bar. It was in this studio that she introduced me to the mysterious works of the medieval Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. Later, I wrote Bosch and her into Histories of Time. She became Wai-yan, the personal caregiver and amateur painter of the Dictator, and created an “ice rink mural” on the wall of the writer’s living room. The background of The Age of Learning is set in Sai Kung, somewhat related to Ian Leong since she grew up there. The artist Magic Bean in the novel has an apprentice named Wai-yan, clearly inspired by her. One could say that Ian Leong and her paintings have become the source of inspiration and motivation for my novelistic creations. From initially illustrating my novels to now becoming co-creators, Bodhisattva 18 is not just a work by Dung Kai-cheung but also a work by Ian Leong, without any distinction between primary and secondary.
Looking back nineteen years ago, when I saw a girl walk up from the last row of the classroom to ask me a question, who could have predicted that this would be the meeting of two creators and the transformation of two lives? She to me, and I to her, are also bodhisattvas. It is a rare and precious opportunity to become bodhisattvas to each other.
Dung Kai-cheung
18.5.2024