Artist Steven Tang draws Hong Kong food ^{CEFR B2}

Steven Tang, a 26-year-old self-taught artist in Hong Kong, has built a following by hand-drawing local dishes with coloured pencils and sharing them on Instagram. He began in 2018 and his page has attracted more than 45,000 followers. His first widely noticed piece was a bowl of Yunnan-style rice noodles from the TamJai chain in 2018. Since then he has taken part in group shows and was featured in Art Central in 2023 and the Affordable Art Fair last year.

Tang says his drawings are not mere copies of reality. He sometimes photographs food for reference, but other times he buys food and brings it to his studio to arrange an "ideal" version. He then alters form, colour and composition so the finished image is more visually pleasing; for example, he once added pieces of char siu without buying them because perfect barbecue pork was hard to find. He also avoids heavily sauced dishes and chooses subjects with an eye to what "can sell."

A second motive is to record tastes that may be fading, such as a two-dish rice meal from a Chinese University of Hong Kong canteen that later shuttered. After more than seven years, Tang faces creative and practical challenges: finding fresh ways to show familiar dishes, planning social media presentation, and coping with changed platform algorithms. He used playful compositions before, for example shaping a pork patty dish like Lion Rock, and now adds real utensils in short videos to attract attention.

His main difficulty is time: he must run a drawing studio, teach classes and still produce new work. Many full-time artists work only with galleries, but Tang is not ready to give up teaching. He called the situation a gamble, saying "the art market may not necessarily like my work, so it is a gamble." Looking ahead, he will stage his first solo exhibition next September and needs to create more than ten new drawings. He also plans to revive a Cantonese-language YouTube channel dormant for over five years. On the rise of artificial intelligence, he argued that successful artists will keep value if they build a distinct personal brand, noting that AI might generate a Van Gogh painting but would not make Van Gogh's work worthless. He hopes that, when people talk about coloured-pencil artists in Hong Kong, his name will come to mind first.