The 24 Paragons of Filial Piety is a series of traditional Chinese folk tales that illustrate acts of extreme loyalty performed by children for their parents. The Hong Kong artist Fion Hung Ching-Yan has used those stories – which her father used to tell her at bedtime – as the visual stimuli for her series of therapeutic pictures, The Skeletons in the Closet. Think Eminem meets Confucius.
This image, now on show in Brighton, is based on the ancient story of the child who visits a family friend in a distant province and is given a mandarin orange. The family friend observes the child stealing two more oranges and hiding them in his sleeve. The host’s anger at the theft turns to praise, however, when he discovers that the child has taken the fruit not for himself but for his mother at home. Hung, it seems, is not wholly convinced by the implied guilt trip of that parable – the moral of her updated story is that there would never be enough oranges to satisfy the demands of her parents; she needs one or two for herself.
