Page 4 - Brian Tilbrook - Post Magazine 13-02-22

PROFILE

rian Tilbrook – artist, set
designer, former teacher and
long-term Hong Kong resident –
turns 90 on Friday, which is also
the day an 11-week exhibition
of his work was due to open
at the University Museum and
BArt Gallery at the University of
Hong Kong. The gallery is currently closed because of
Covid-19 restrictions but Tilbrook is confident it will,
eventually, open.
“It doesn’t bother me in the slightest if it’s six weeks
or five weeks,” he says. Clamouring for space is not
an unknown concept for Tilbrook: “I’ll even settle for
two weeks.”
In the old days – before the Hong Kong Museum of
Art, or M+ – there was never enough space for Hong
Kong exhibitions. A lottery would be held for the brief,
prime slots at City Hall.
The genial, fresh-faced Tilbrook recalls “the manager
drawing my name out of the bag and saying, ‘Oh, Brian!
You’ve got the plum week’”. Here, the artist gives a tiny
frown and murmurs, “He shouldn’t have said that, he
should have said, ‘Mr Tilbrook’ … That was the best
allocation at the time. I’d have hated other artists
standing around to think I’d been given preferential
treatment and I don’t think I had.”
Tilbrook’s first City Hall exhibition was in January
1968 (it ran for a week) and included paintings that had
been originally commissioned by the Mandarin hotel for

EARLY TILBROOKS WERE

OFTEN METICULOUS
DEPICTIONS OF ASIAN
CULTURAL SITES – IN
CAMBODIA, LAOS, MACAU –
BUT EVEN THEN, HE INCLINED
TOWARDS THE ABSTRACT.

British Week, a 1966 trade promotion graced by Queen
Elizabeth’s sister, Princess Margaret. Tilbrook has had
a long relationship with hotels, banks and offices in
Asia. He used to have a Cathay Pacific name card that
described him as the airline’s “travelling artist”.
And yet much of Tilbrook’s work is no longer visible.
Either the owners have left or the buildings have been
demolished, although, in this city, glimpses remain in
Pacific Place, Central Plaza and the Hong Kong Club.
For the HKU exhibition, he has borrowed – or made a
few photographic prints of – the originals; and almost
until the moment the collection sailed from Lamma to
what he calls “the mainland” of Hong Kong Island, he
was creating new pieces.
“I’ve still got to do the final touches on that one,
my first reaction to global warming,” he says, one
recent afternoon, pointing to an unnamed painting
propped against the wall in his home, where he lives
with Moyreen, his wife of almost 60 years. The tableau
suggests conflagration, scorched buildings, a scene
raked by lines of what could be financial charts or
collapsing debris, which he says represent the scars of
“burnt ambition”.
Early Tilbrooks were often meticulous depictions

February 13, 2022 // Post Magazine 11