Yuen Long is very much a treasure trove of old buildings, walled villages, temples, ancient trees and age-old customs and festivals in a natural setting. It was chosen by Huang Bore’s father-in-law Deng Erya (1844-1954), an eminent calligrapher and philologist, to set up home when he migrated to Hong Kong. The plains were characterized by a cluster of fields, farmland, vegetable plots and fish ponds before the 1980s. These sights are vividly captured in Huang Bore’s paintings in which intersecting lines mimic the footpaths between fields and ink dots the crops thriving in the fields, virtually abstractions made up of dots, lines and planes when viewed at close quarters. Unlike more traditional compositions, the painting surface is taken up entirely by fields, extending from the foreground right into the background to suggest the vastness of the agricultural land.

Lau Fau Shan was where Huang Bore would often stop by to have a treat of oysters, the local specialty, whenever he visited Yuen Long. It is therefore only natural that the area should have become a recurrent theme for the painter. The focus, however, is on the beaches rather than the oyster beds. Huang Bore noticed in particular that the beaches here, like any other across Hong Kong, are bordered inland by a dark sand dune that is two to three metres high and marked by cacti and he accordingly made this a unique element in his paintings.