When Craig Au-yeung and I sat down to lunch in Zen in Pacific Place, there was a cockroach at our table. The waiters could not help noticing as it was not at all the sort of thing you usually got in this pristine-to-the-point-of-unmemorable restaurant. Mind you, Cockroach, the quarterly comic book Au-yeung will launch on Tuesday, would have taken some ignoring as he wielded it over the table. It is big - tabloid newspaper-sized - and has the little beasties printed large all over its cover. It is a bizarre product from the well-known Hong Kong DJ, artist and columnist: he does not like the insects and grimaced as he said it. But he is collaborating with 20 local artists from many fields to bring out the comic here and in Japan, Britain, Taiwan and, most unlikely of venues, Paris. Maybe the unsavoury nature of our meeting was the reason the restaurant's staff stuck us in a freezing wilderness, right at the back of the room in a tiny corner, despite a number of better, empty tables, which would have let us look out on the bustle of Pacific Place. Cooking smells accumulated there, to be soaked up by our clothing. But Au-yeung, who was extremely charming company, said the 'not-up-to-the-minute' interior design reminded him of how the upmarket Chinese restaurant was the first of its kind when it opened five years ago, and scuttled straight back to his favourite subject as we ordered. 'Do you realise they are three billion years old, older than dinosaurs? They're like me, like alternative artists. We're pushed into corners and told we're not commercial, too. But we do have something to say. We have survival techniques and flexibility, too.' As jasmine tea arrived - to be swiftly followed by gawping waiters bearing endless dim sum - Au-yeung, creator of Craig's Comix and a fixture in Hong Kong's alternative comic scene for the past decade, said the idea started a few months ago at an exhibition at Broadway Cinematheque, when he and fellow artist Li Chi-tak produced 20 panels of artwork and a little pamphlet to go with it. All 2,500 copies of the book were soon sold out and they decided the ubiquitous roach could prove a perfect vehicle for alternative artists. 'Our comics had been noticed, but for newcomers there are not many chances, especially with the closure of magazines here lately.' Did he draw his own naive, honest, black-and-white cartoons from a few live specimens crawling around his Discovery Bay apartment-cum-office? 'It was from books and I did lots of research. But the strange thing is for a long time, my girlfriend and I had no cockroaches. We're very tidy. Then after the pamphlet came out, I suddenly found quite a few small ones.' There will be a first print run of 3,500, and Cockroach will be available in good bookstores in Hong Kong, like Swindon and Page One. The artists - in graphics, fine art, photography, and print-making - have also collaborated with a clothing company, Kitterick, to produce a range of clothing printed with work from the comic book. The next issue will feature the work of Taiwan and Beijing artists. We tucked the book appropriately under the table and started on steamed vegetarian dumpling ($35), mushrooms, fungus and carrot rolled in carrot leaves and dumpling soup with shark's fin ($48), served with ginger vinegar. 'Too much MSG,' pronounced Au-yeung. An excess of enthusiasm, I would have said. The shark was jostling in the bowl with lots of other seafood. The dumpling had no particular taste. We both disliked the cheung fun, 'Chinese pasta', served with sesame and spring onions ($30). 'It's better a little bit more chewy,' said Au-yeung. 'This is too melty. And I prefer a beef or a shrimp filling. People have got so creative with the fillings for these now.' There was an excess of spring onion which made a curious combination with the smooth, soft rice flour rolls. 'When I was young, we just had Chinese pasta at dai pai dongs in the morning. You ate them with lots of different sauces. For me, it's still a breakfast thing, rather than lunch. Ordering it needs technique. You tend to order too much.' Au-yeung is a man of contrasts. His career has followed a strange path. A graduate of Polytechnic University 10 years ago, he has produced TV commercials, DJ'd on Commercial Radio for years, set up City Magazine in Taiwan, has a master's degree in philosophy, and writes interior design columns for Ming Pao and Esquire to satisfy hankerings to be an architect. As we munched on steamed fresh shrimp dumplings ($32) - wonderfully thin wrappings stuffed with a juicy whole shrimp - Au-yeung mentioned he has also published 'eight or nine' comic books now on sale here, in Taiwan and on the mainland. 'I was astonished mainland China accepted my style and content, it can be quite political. 'I write daily news into my comics. I want it to be a social critique, to make a statement. But the thing about comics is you can get this balance between heavy and light. Comics in Asia have been pure entertainment. But in recent years, their story-telling ability has been noticed. Yet in Chinese, the word 'alternative' is still a negative word, referring to extremes. 'A cockroach can find its own place outside. So can alternative artists,' said Au-yeung as he ate 'up-to-standard but not especially good' steamed pork dumplings with elm fungus and yellow fungus ($32). 'Cockroach is a collective effort. Some of us have books out, but as individuals. This will be an event, a promotion of artists.' The comic could not be launching at a better time, Au-yeung reckons. The recession has made people like sponsors Commercial Radio realise there has to be more to life than making money. We finished with a sweet oven-baked chicken and abalone pie ($32), tasty gravy in a good Western-style flaky pastry. After paying a very reasonable bill of $279.50 we wandered out, over-full, into streamlined, gleaming Pacific Place, where a cockroach, however pushy, would fear to tread. Zen, Basement, Pacific Place, Admiralty, Tel: 2845-4555
