Jason Phu Evan on a Sunday morning at the gallery having a ginger tea...

The full title of this work is Evan on a Sunday morning at the gallery having a ginger tea with some old fat snoring man and some lady pushing someone’s annoying crying baby around in a blue pram, and no, you can’t smoke here mate.

Evan Hughes runs the Hughes Gallery with his father Ray. ‘I chose Evan because I don’t know that many distinguished people in the arts and my mate Noel said Evan would be good to paint,’ says Phu.

‘Evan was hard to draw. I don’t really like drawing people exactly how they look but that’s all right. The old man fell asleep as I drew him. I wanted to draw the baby crying but he wasn’t when he came in. I was going to take his toys away but then he started crying anyway so I shouldn’t have worried.

‘I wrote some poems in Chinese text to accompany the image. I’d be kind of embarrassed if people read them so the less people that can, the better. The really big one at the back is a Google translation of part of an article Steve Meacham wrote that I liked.’

Born in Sydney in 1989, Phu graduated from the College of Fine Arts in 2011. He has also studied in Nova Scotia and Beijing. His artwork draws on his upbringing and life as a Chinese-Australian.