Julie May

Julie May (b. 2000) is a Hong Kong-based printmaker who works in intaglio — etching, drypoint, chine collé, and related copperplate techniques — with a stated interest in subverting the social and cultural conventions surrounding identity and artistic production. After completing her undergraduate studies at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in Australia, she returned to Hong Kong and is now a resident artist at the Hong Kong Open Printshop (HKOP), the city's principal non-profit printmaking studio.

In 2025 May was one of two recipients of the Hong Kong Open Printshop Award, alongside Enna Cheung Yeuk-fei. The award includes a six-month residency at HKOP's 4,000-square-foot Print Lab at the Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre (JCCAC), with mentorship, technical support, and an exhibition venue. The two recipients each received solo exhibitions at HKOP's Print Art Contemporary space at the PMQ heritage complex, accompanied by live demonstrations at the Print Lab.

May's solo exhibition catalogue centres on a body of mostly small-format intaglio prints made between 2023 and 2025, with the prints themselves working through tonal shifts in blended metal plates and what she describes as 'alchemic processes' — referring loosely to the chemical interaction of mordant baths, ground waxes, soft-ground textures, and inking variations across iterative states of the same plate. The 2025 exhibition prints include 'Brothers on the Ground' (drypoint, 500 × 351 mm, the largest sheet in the suite), 'Passing by Familiar Strings' (etching with monotype, 355 × 498 mm), 'In Our Soil Bed' (etching, 355 × 330 mm), 'Queen' (etching, 389 × 330 mm), 'Give the Dirt a Little Room' (etching with chine collé, 142 × 190 mm), and the smaller 'Music II' (etching, 125 × 95 mm). Earlier prints retained in the catalogue include 'Chord' (etching, 2024) and 'Never Miss the Honey' (etching, 2023).

May's stated approach draws on classical printmaking traditions of both Chinese and Western origins, and her practice is characterized by a deliberate engagement with 'otherness' as a strategic element through which to explore legacy and courage in mark-making. The 'In Nature's Vibrato' working concept that frames her current series treats the print surface as a permeable membrane — colours and textures arranged so that the resulting images behave 'like music, fluid and unfixed.' The bilingual product titles (English and Chinese, including 與一個橙穿越虛擬與現實 / 'A Trip through Virtuality and Physicality with an Orange' for one of her HKOP gallery-mate Fung Ho-yin's prints, and her own 'Music' and 'Chord' series) signal the bicultural orientation of HKOP's contemporary print scene.

May's training at RMIT places her within the Australian intaglio tradition — RMIT has been a centre for Australian printmaking since the post-war period — but her decision to return to Hong Kong for residency and her HKOP affiliation locate her within Hong Kong's emerging young-artist printmaking circle. The 2025 HKOP Award marks her formal recognition by the Hong Kong print community as a serious working printmaker, and her solo exhibition at Print Art Contemporary serves as the principal documentation of her catalogue to date.

Because May is in the early career stage and the HKOP residency is her current institutional anchor, the principal English-language documentation of her practice is the HKOP Print Art Contemporary catalogue (hkprintartcontemp.myshopify.com/collections/julie-may) and her own artist site (juliemayarts.com). She has yet to be acquired by a major museum collection, and her print editions are small (HKOP gallery editions typically run to 5-10 impressions). The work documented here represents the visible portion of her practice as of the 2025 exhibition; future research could extend through HKOP's annual exhibition catalogues and Hong Kong-based print society publications.