The art of healing

Sweet escape

An increasing number of artists are exploring mental health-related themes as part of their practice. Wu Didi's paintings of malleable bamboo stalks and tangled weeds, brought to Art Central by Contemporary by Angela Li gallery, have a calming effect on the viewer. Tracing the lines visually can be a form of meditation.

Also showing at Art Central are works by Indonesian painter Taufik Ermas (represented by Artemis Art). Ermas was trapped under rubble following the 2006 earthquake that devastated the Javanese city of Yogyakarta. The psychological scars he still bears are manifest in the artist's specially crafted canvases replete with collage, needlework figures and cutouts.

Mental-health-themed art is also represented in Hong Kong's gallery district. Not too far away from the site of the art fairs at HKCEC, New York-based Stacy Leigh's solo show, Escape to B-Roll, is on show at WOAW Gallery's Central space. The 10 paintings exhibited here were triggered by the artist's fantasy of "selling her apartment and moving to a house somewhere with no neighbors".

"I think it's important to shine a light on mental health; I just try to do it with humor," says Leigh. The show was conceived as an escape from the dispute the artist was having with the management of the New York condo she was living in at the time. "I used the canvases to create a little world I could escape into and forget about the ugly situation I was forced to live with."

She hopes that viewers will have their own takeaways from her paintings: "I find that once I release a work of art into the world, to be seen by other people, their interpretation exposes something I had not seen before."