IF ZING hasn't created a signature look when it comes to fashion, perhaps he does adhere to one: tall, slim, his ears studded with mini-marble size diamonds, large-framed glasses and a Chanel jacket. 'I love to wear Chanel,' he says. His private studio is littered with Chanel bags choking with other designer embroidered jackets. 'They fit my frame. I don't wear make-up ever, I really don't care for it on my skin, but I do love Chanel.'
His make-up school is in the heart of Central, long corridors festooned with frames of the famed and the fortuned, coated with distinctive make-up styles that vary from the exotic to the quixotic - yet each unmistakably gorgeous. Zing, 41, the one-named man and brand has been touching-up the faces of Asia's most beautiful women - and men - for the past two decades, their visages providing a remarkable canvas for his creative bent.
'Like all faces, the beautiful ones I can enhance, the plain ones provide a blank canvas,' he says. 'I have no preference between a celebrity or a model. With models, I choose the subject as they have faces of a certain proportion, symmetrical faces I can work with to create whatever's on my mind. When it comes to singers or actresses, they choose me; they ring me to do their make-up and I get to work with them to enhance their looks. Working with singers is interesting as you have to enhance the persona, keeping in mind their image.'
When he started in the 1980s, Zing was not following in the footsteps of any particular role model. 'I had no idea why I wanted to get into make-up. I knew nothing about it,' he says. 'I just knew I had to do it. I learnt through trial and error. There was no one to train me, no school to educate me.'
Zing says he would go to discos and clubs and ask models and other beautiful girls if he could do their make-up. 'They all said yes; there were no divas back then,' he says. 'We'd do test shoots, and the models would introduce me to photographers. One thing led to another and I'd keep on working.'
Although Zing came to Hong Kong from Singapore in 1989, there was another connection with the island that elevated him from the flock, a project he distinctly remembers. 'There was a quarterly, high-end magazine in Singapore that every model wanted to be in, every photographer wanted to shoot for,' he recollects. 'They flew in the gorgeous Janet Ma from Hong Kong. She was the 'it' girl on the scene. That shoot got me noticed.
'In Hong Kong, people do the work for the money. In Singapore, the pay wasn't great, but the credit was. Your name in print meant something - like it does in Paris or London. I always tell aspiring make-up artists to do their job, put blinders on and focus purely on the work; the money and fame would follow.'