Arthur Hacker’s Unique Hand 許敬雅的藝術之手
Arthur Hacker left London in 1967 for a job as an art director in the colonial Hong Kong Government’s Information Services Department. Among his luggage would have been the air of London’s cultural whirl, glimpsed in the ambience of movies of the time: Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup; revolutionary youth against the whole (damn) system in Lindsay Anderson’s If… ; and the violence and Stalinist social conditioning in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Hacker brought his tight modernist graphic skills with him, complemented by the era’s psychedelia and surreal humour. His artist’s eye was broadened by the satire and profanity of Oz magazine; the bright animation of The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine; the era’s counterculture and rock music; its fashion, book, magazine and record cover design; and the ground-breaking pop art of his British contemporaries Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton. These progressive influences and an openness to depictions of life’s oddities would form a key source for Hacker’s curlicue graphical drawings. Hacker came to Hong Kong with a liberal, individual outlook on life and over the years he …