For many Singaporeans, Hong Kong is a familiar city. It is a shopping capital for the trendy, a gastronomic haven for food lovers and a perennial hideaway for holidaymakers.

For painter Tse Yim On, 39, who calls the city home, however, it is an enduring enigma.

The Hong Kong artist has spent his more than 10-year career grappling with the elusive culture and identity of the former British colony and now semi-autonomous Chinese territory.

He says: "When I picked up on this issue more than 10 years ago, I was still in university and not quite serious about it. But it was the hottest issue among intellectuals."

The late 1990s was a perplexing time for Hong Kong and its residents. The period was marked by the territory's handover in 1997 from British to Chinese rule, and with it, a wave of social and political change swept through the city.

Among the most visible mutations was the loss of familiar neighbourhoods such as Canton Road in the Tsim Sha Tsui area. The local hang-out with its hodgepodge of stores and eateries, for example, quickly gave way to flagship shops of international luxury brands and mainland Chinese shoppers.

Indeed, it was the erosion of an everyday culture rooted in the way of life of the locals that made the question of a Hong Kong identity personal to Tse.

The artist, who has a master's degree in fine art from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, says:

"The city was no longer familiar to us. We are in Hong Kong but the place feels like a foreign settlement.

"We still love this place but we feel that the city no longer loves us anymore."

Yet Tse, a bachelor, refused to give up on the city he loves. Instead, he took to immortalising current affairs and elements of popular culture that shaped Hong Kong identity in his paintings, albeit also sneaking in wry observations of how its identity has changed.

His works are on show in his first solo exhibition in Singapore, which is held at iPreciation gallery in Cuscaden Road. The paintings are for sale and priced between $7,000 and $30,000.

The exhibition features two series of works. The first, Insane Fairy Tale, is characterised by painterly collages of images.

The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz from this series, for example, is a synthesis of images ranging from political figures such as the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping to symbols of the 1989 protest in China's Tiananmen Square and cartoon characters.

Tse says: "The images are not directly related in a narrative sense where A plus B plus C gives viewers the answer to what I am painting. It is an open-ended story that viewers are free to interpret for themselves."

But he realises that the dense web of imagery and symbols may not be easily recognised or understood by the man in the street so he embarked on a second series, Mongkok Library, in 2010.

The series simplifies the question of identity and culture through paintings that depict a single person reading a book. The title of each painting is a clue to the identity of the reader, and often, there are rich layers of meaning between the identity of the reader and the choice of book.

The painting Siu Ping in this series, for example, is a tongue-in-cheek work that shows the late Chinese leader Deng, who died before he could witness the historical handover of Hong Kong, holding the Hong Kong porn magazine titled Hong Kong 97.

While the topics Tse raises are serious and sometimes sensitive, he often presents them with a touch of humour and a vivid palette of colours to convey his optimism in reconstructing Hong Kong culture and identity through his paintings.

He says: "Now, more than 10 years after I first started painting these works, I realise that this is my mission, to show Hong Kong culture in a different way."

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