Sacred Sunday
Firenze Lai
黎清妍
Production date
2013
Object Detail
Media
oil on canvas
Measurements
61 x 51 cm
Notes
Firenze Lai’s Sacred Sunday (2013) depicts two women looking out of the canvas from a dark background, perhaps formally dressed for church. One wears a bright yellow patterned shirt with an enormous, swooping collar; her companion is more sombrely clothed in indigo. Quick, deft brush-marks of rose madder, yellow ochre, Payne’s grey and pale pink block in the features of their stylised faces. Long narrow noses, dark lips and heavily shadowed eyes are startling against the white ground. Their hair, the background and the blocks of strong colour representing their clothing in the foreground are painted with a heavier impasto. The artist was inspired by the familiar scenes in Hong Kong each Sunday, when thousands of domestic workers from Indonesia and the Philippines gather in the parks and shopping malls to sing, dance and picnic together. An already crowded city becomes even more densely packed as the women congregate, sitting on blankets and sheets of cardboard, a brightly coloured feminine invasion of the CBD.
Accession number
2014.143