Deaf artist who lost life’s work in Hong Kong’s Tai Po fire is ‘painting to heal myself’

For Hong Kong-based artist Apple Tong Wing-yin, Wang Fuk Court has always been more than a home address. It was a library of her life’s work.

Tong, a prominent deaf illustrator and graphic designer who communicates through what she calls her “silent language” of art, kept the many canvases that spoke for her inside her flat in the Tai Po housing estate.

In the immediate aftermath of the November blaze at Wang Fuk Court – which claimed 168 lives – Tong and her mother stayed in temporary shelters. She shares with the South China Morning Post in a written interview that she felt “forgotten” for days, lost in a noise she could not hear.

‘Moving from chaos and pain to calm’

Rather than retreat into the grief, she started to draw again.

“After the fire, I lost my home and all my past work. When I picked up a brush again, the first emotion I had to put on paper was moving from chaos and pain to calm,” Tong writes. “I needed to turn this disaster into positive energy and use painting to heal myself.”