The Mystery of Antonio Casadei, Hong Kong’s Classic 1960s Artist

What happened to Antonio Casadei?

There was once a time when the Italian artist’s work was ubiquitous in Hong Kong. The South China Morning Post noted that there was “evidence of his talent lies virtually wherever one looks,” and that “almost every hotel has something or other of his.” 

That was in 1983, the year Casadei left Hong Kong after more than two decades of living and working here. Today, only a few of his public artworks remain standing. His name has all but faded from the public imagination. When journalist Fionnuala McHugh began working on a profile of Casadei in 2023, she kept stumbling into dead ends. “I felt I was making a tapestry out of cobwebs,” she says.

McHugh struggled to find anyone who had a personal connection to Casadei. “He kept a low social profile,” she noted in her article for Artomity magazine. Most of Casadei’s associates are now dead, including Don Ashton, former art director for the 1957 blockbuster The Bridge on the River Kwai, who was working on the interior design for the Mandarin Oriental; he hired Casadei to create artworks for the new hotel on Chater Road, which opened in 1963. Others who remember Casadei seem only to have had a passing relationship with him. And though Casadei started a family with a local artist named Frances Wong Bick-yue, their two children have never spoken publicly about their father.

And yet, what remains of Casadei’s work in Hong Kong is tantalising enough to want to learn more about him. He created colourful ceramic panels for Statue Square in 1965. In 1968, when work began on Mei Foo — Hong Kong’s first large-scale private housing estate — he was commissioned to make several sculptures, including a giant winged Pegasus. Renowned soy sauce Western restaurant Tai Ping Koon hired him to create a sculptural ceramic panel when it opened a new Causeway Bay branch in 1970. 

A man of his time

All of these works still exist today, though the only hint of the man behind them is a signature chiselled in a Roman style. “They’re all wonderfully 60s,” says photographer and regular Zolima CityMag contributor William Furniss, who documented Casadei’s surviving works for a 2023 exhibition. “When you encounter a massive shiny mythical beast in a Hong Kong housing estate, it’s quite arresting. I went there specifically to catch the Pegasus and it was fully lit at its most gorgeous and glamorous. It really looked like a wild beast. It’s also got massive steel balls and a penis. That’s quite fun.”

The exhibition, which was held at the gallery/bar Ping Pong Gintonería, was the brainchild of curator, retired architect and fourth-generation Hongkonger Hugh Zimmern. “When I was growing up there were a lot of his works around,” he says. “All the lobbies in the Prince’s Building, the Mandarin hotel. And I’ve always known his name, because when he first arrived in Hong Kong, he must have gone round Central door to door, selling his paintings. My father bought two.”

Zimmern has long been interested in Hong Kong’s mid-century art scene; he previously mounted an exhibition in exploring local art from the 1970s, before Hong Kong had any art museums or even commercial galleries. “I put together the Antonio Casadei exhibition because there was so much stuff of his around at one point, but so much lacking in terms of the man,” says Zimmern. “But even after putting the exhibition together I don’t think there was much more than when I started.”

From Italy to Hong Kong

Here’s what we do know about Casadei. He was born in the northern Italian village of Forlì in 1923, where his father Maceo was a painter. The family moved to Rome in 1933 when Macao was hired as a photographer by the Istituto Luce, which produced propaganda for Italy’s Fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini. Casadei inherited his father’s talents, becoming a painter and award-winning photographer himself. But he was truly interested in ceramics, which is what he studied after enduring World War II as a young conscript in the Royal Italian Army. 

Casadei won commissions to create large ceramic panels for office buildings, private residences and hotels, while also teaching art in Rome – which is where he met Frances Wong, who was studying there at the time. He decided to visit her hometown to study Chinese porcelain. Like so many sojourners, he ended up staying. Casadei’s first local exhibition of paintings, decorated glass, metal sculpture and ceramic objects was held at the newly-opened Hong Kong City Hall in 1962, earning a rave review in the South China Morning Post.

That exhibition caught the attention of Don Ashton, who commissioned Casadei to create a number of works for the Mandarin Oriental, including giant sunflowers on the ceiling of the Lookout Lounge, Chinese shadow puppets for the hotel café and decorative golden twirls for the tables of the Clipper Lounge. The hotel’s developer, Hongkong Land, was impressed enough to hire Casadei to create artworks for the redeveloped Prince’s Building. He took inspiration from the name to create royalty-themed panels and a chandelier, all of it sculpted out of polyester resin, a novel material that Casadei was interested in exploring.

Casadei’s work on the Prince’s Building led to even more commissions, including nine sculpted murals for the rooftop swimming pool of the Marco Polo Hongkong Hotel. Andrew Chui, the fifth-generation owner of Tai Ping Koon, told McHugh that his grandfather hired Casadei “partly because he was famous and partly because he used to eat at the Wan Chai branch.” The commission apparently cost as much as buying a Wan Chai flat.

Tai Ping Koon patrons can still enjoy the mural today, but Casadei’s works at the Prince’s Building, Mandarin Oriental and Marco Polo were all destroyed at some point in time. Casadei left Hong Kong in 1983, resettling in Spain, where he continued making art until his death in 2014. His name might have vanished entirely from Hong Kong’s consciousness if not for McHugh’s article and Zimmern’s exhibition, which have sparked a certain revival of interest. 

“Everyone passes by his work [in Statue Square or Mei Foo] but no one really thinks about the fact that it’s actually made by someone,” says Zimmern. “Now, they are able to put a name to something they might have passed every day. It was a bit of a revelation.” 

As it turns out, there’s another twist to the story. Regular Zolima CityMag contributor Ilaria Maria Sala, herself an Italian ceramicist, recently discovered that she is related to Antonio Casadei. We asked her to share her story, in her own words. 

Ilaria Maria Sala: family and ceramics

Like most Italian surnames, Casadei carries very strong regional connotations. Nationwide, Casadei is not all that common, but in the central region Romagna, and in particular in the cities of Forlì, Cesena and Faenza, it is impossible not to meet quite a number of people with that surname. 

The name is a contraction of “house of god” with a not uncommon mix of Italian (casa) and Latin (dei). It was a surname that long ago was given to children raised in church-run orphanages. It was also my mother’s maiden name. She and her family came from Forlì, a small city of a little more than 100,000 inhabitants, where I would go to spend time with my grandmother and cousins – all of them Casadeis. 

All of this to say that, one day, as I was sitting in front of the Supreme Court in Statue Square, I started to examine the two ceramic fountains. I find them very beautiful, and as a person who works with ceramics myself, I can’t help but appreciate their technical and artistic complexity. One of the two has a paler palette, a white background in stone dotted with ceramic tiles in relief. They are a series of irregular squares and rectangles, and come in an array of colours – deep red, white, ochre, ochre and blue, orange, pale turquoise, black. Abstract and geometrical marks have been incised on their surface. You can easily spend quite a bit of time appreciating how nicely the small turquoise tiles on the fountain floor contrast with the white-themed panel, and how intriguing the extruding tiles are, with their mysterious symbols on them. The second fountain is in a darker style, with abstract decorations that bring to mind architectural elements like arcades or doors; they are covered in a brown red and ochre glaze. 

Admiring these works, I was struck by the name CASADEI inscribed in capital letters. Such a familiar and locally specific name! Was this someone I should have known about? A relative or a neighbour – someone my relatives might be aware of?

After quickly searching on my phone, I discovered they were the work of Antonio Casadei, and I sent a WhatsApp to my aunt. “I think he was the son of Maceo, the painter,” she replied. She offered to ask other relatives for me. I called her a few days later, and she confirmed of having heard of Casadei’s “Hong Kong wife.” She also said she had checked with her friends about a possible connection to my grandmother — my great-grandmother had ten brothers and sisters, so it is not too surprising that some of their life stories are now either forgotten or patchily remembered — but added that nobody remembered a lot more. 

I told her about the fountains, in ceramic, and in reply she mentioned Faenza – a town known for its ceramics, where Casadei had studied the artform in 1944. (Faience, a type of tin-glazed pottery, takes its name from the town.) It was a natural destination for anybody from Forlì who was interested in ceramic arts. But not all of them would later move to Hong Kong.