Also showing: Yank Wong Yan-kwai
Yank Wong Yan-kwai is quick to offer his apologies as he hurries into Club 71 - he's nearly 45 minutes late for our appointment, which he admits to having 'completely forgotten', even though it's only two days ago that the meeting was set up. The Paris-trained artist has been so engrossed in a piece he's doing that he's tossed away his mental note about this interview for his Hong Kong Film Awards-nominated work as art director on Lawrence Lau Kwok-cheung's Besieged City.
'It's always like that when I become too focused in my work at home,' he says, adding he loses all sense of time once he's in front of a canvas.
It's not something he's comfortable with: he says such detachment from the outside world make painters socially awkward. 'As time goes on, painters have difficulty communicating with others, and trouble articulating ideas. That's the reason behind what people describe as the 'artistic temperament' - and it spawns unnecessary conflict in our human relationships.'
Wong (above) says his on-and-off career art directing for films is partly to avoid becoming a recluse.
Unconventional influences shaped his formative years: an ardent social activist in his teens, he wrote, drew cartoons and helped edit left-wing periodicals in the early 1970s. He left for France soon after, spending seven years there before returning to Hong Kong. He drifted into the world of cinema in the first half of the 80s as designer for films such as Hong Kong, Hong Kong (1983) and The Long Arm of the Law (1984).
He was soon rewarded for his efforts: his work for Derek Yee Tung-shing's directorial debut The Lunatics, a sharp, gritty socio-realist feature film about the difficult lives of a group of mentally challenged men, won Wong a best art direction award at the Hong Kong Film Awards in 1987.
More remarkable movie work followed, as Wong built a solid relationship with Lau (they worked on 1990's Queen of Temple Street and 1993's Three Summers) and Ann Hui On-wah (Summer Snow, Ah Kam and Eighteen Springs - Wong says he left the last film halfway after falling out with Hui).
Wong admits to a penchant for socially conscious drama. 'If a director sees his work as part of the entertainment business then I'd try my best not to choose them - or to be chosen by them.' This can be seen in the odd screenplay he's delivered: he was one of the writers of Jacob Cheung Chi-leung's Cageman, an engaging film in 1992 about residents living in caged bunkers in a Kowloon tenement block. Wong won the best screenplay award.
That he has won prizes in more than one category is an illustration of Wong's standing, in local artistic circles, as a modern-day renaissance man. Apart from his paintings and film work, he's also a respected writer (he won a Hong Kong Biennial Award for Chinese literature with an omnibus of short pieces) and musician (playing concerts and jams at venues such as Club 71).
He's not one to boast of his multi-hyphenated persona - and he's dismissive of art directors who have a visible presence in their films. 'An art director is there to help directors tell a story. He shouldn't be at the forefront ... our work is to assist in the storytelling. I never believed we should leave a signature on other people's films.'
Besieged City opens today
