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Wilson Pang Sze-tai puts the finishing touches to the Monkey King display. Photos: Edward Wong

Lego landscapes and a balloon Monkey King loom large at Hong Kong games fair

Comics, cosplay and creativity shine on opening day of Ani-Com & Games Hong Kong

Lauren Chan

This year’s ani-com fair has a particular Hong Kong flavour, with a million Lego pieces yielding landscapes of Central and Chek Lap Kok airport, and a two-metre Monkey King made of balloons.

The 18th annual Ani-Com & Games Hong Kong fair opened its doors at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre on Friday and runs until Tuesday. It features 608 stalls from around 70 exhibitors.
Star Wars toys are always a popular attraction at the fair.
Visitors can get their hands on unreleased games and products from PlayStation and Xbox, while checking out action figures from the latest Marvel and Star Wars films. Comics and cosplayers were also major attractions.

The Lego landscapes measure at least four metres long and illustrate past and present versions of Central and the international airport in great detail. There are even a dozen planes, the largest a one-metre 747 made up of 20,000 Lego pieces.

Cosplayers act out their comic book fantasies.
“The Lego we build has a story behind it,” said William Wong, one of the creators of the airport piece, who has been a Lego builder for more than 20 years. “The contrast between past and present tells us we need to treasure what we have now,” he explained, referring to the contrast between the Kai Tak and Chek Lap Kok airports, which took two months to build.
Darth Vader leads stormtroopers into action.
Adrian Sinn Cheuk-lap, seven, built a smaller but equally impressive exhibit of firemen in action, winning Lego’s junior architect competition.

The youngster spent two weeks assembling the display, which includes four rooms and dozens of firemen. But he was most proud of the tuition centre room, which includes a Lego blackboard and computer.

Just one of the games that feature at the fair in the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre.
Towering over the fair is the ferocious looking Monkey King, made out of 1,000 balloons twisted and tied together. It took an award-winning, five-strong team three months to test the feasibility of the project and two days to produce it. They were crowned champions at the World Balloon Convention competition in April,

“The hardest part was figuring how to transform an illustration into a life-like statue,” team member Wayne Chan Kit-wai, 24, said.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Monkey King keeps watch as the games begin
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