Hong Kong-based artists design stunning covers for re-launch of Cathay Pacific magazine

Asia’s premier travel and lifestyle magazine, Discovery, has undergone a facelift.

The success of the re-launched magazine has been largely accredited to four local artists, Michael Lam, Sandra Rauch, Pete Ross and Katrina Teh, who were asked to consider what “Discovery” meant to them.

The resulting work can be seen this month in four varying covers in hard copy print across Cathay Pacific’s flights and digitally through iTunes.

With free reign of artistic expression, the results speak for themselves.

Working with a variety of media, from oil and lacquer on canvas, to pencil on paper, Michael Lam’s signature abstract and surreal painting style cannot be mistaken. Interested in art from an early age, Lam has uniquely carved a niche for himself with his varied body painting installations for events and product launches.

There is no telling what this creative guru will paint next.

Implementing various techniques, such as photography, typography and silk-screen printing in her paintings, Sandra Rauch, hailing from Germany, paints on acrylic glass rather than canvas, piling compressed scenes of the metropolises of New York and Hong Kong on the front and backside of the glass.

Rauch transcends the boundaries of language and culture by allowing open interpretation and enabling the viewer access to new patterns of perception, despite coded ciphers in foreign languages, Asian scripts and pictograms.

Ever since childhood, fourth-generation Scott Pete Ross was drawn towards architecture and its relation to people. These ideas have come particularly into their own recently as Hong Kong experiences times of change and political uncertainty while the territory struggles to find its identity and forge its future.

Utilising traditional methods, Ross challenges convention with his focus on the seeming juxtaposition of the master planned city and the unpredictable nature of people.

Student at Savannah College of Art and Design in Hong Kong, Manilla-born Katrina Teh is a multi-discipline visual artist with a diverse background. Teh conveys her awareness of the passage of time and the presence within a moment with traditional painting in oils, gouache, ink, graphite linework, textural photography and paper collages.

The cover: now officially the best part of Cathay’s Discovery Magazine.