For someone who has lived most of his life in New York, Aun Koh is getting back to his Asian roots in a big way. Having recently returned to his native Singapore, the 27-year-old has - without a hint of self-doubt - launched a glossy pan-Asian lifestyles magazine named East he touts as 'the Vanity Fair of Asia'. A mixture of travel, dining and pap interviews, it 60,000 copies a month constitute a bold bid to capture the cash of big-spending regional advertisers targeting affluent English-speaking Asians in Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia.
In the territory recently on a frenetic visit to drum up investor support and new writers for his four-month old publication, Koh seems preternaturally calm, as if he were born into the role of talking up his ambitious venture. Running his own magazine is something he says he's always wanted to do - it just turns out that he's got around to doing it a few decades earlier than most.
'I got the idea hanging out with people of similar interests,' he says. 'Most of my friends are magazine junkies - we buy everything that comes out. There was nothing [in Asia] telling you about the people, the places, the trends - the things that make life really exciting for the average person in our sort of peer group . I kept thinking, why hasn't anyone put together a regional magazine on a newsstand basis, make it sexy and tap into this sort of newly emerging niche market of young Asians or people living in Asia who are regional travellers . . . ? 'I think there is a certain 'new Asia' emerging that is more self-confident, more self-aware and not so focused only on business and political stability' he adds. 'We are, in a way, very much pushing this idea of a new, modern Asia . . . We're trying to provide a platform for many different voices, many different perspectives. I think a lot of the magazine is me trying to find what Asians think, believe and want nowadays.' Koh refers to his target reader as 'the well-travelled, in a way elite person in this region' - in other words, people more than a little like himself. His father, Professor Tommy Koh, was Singapore's ambassador to the United Nations, then ambassador to the US for most of Koh's childhood. The family left Singapore when he was only two years old. He attended the United Nations International School in New York, where he says 'my class was like a Benetton ad', followed by a New York prep school where he was in the same class as third-generation media tycoon Lachlan Murdoch (they haven't maintained contact). He spent summers in Singapore and later attended New York's Columbia University, where he studied political science and edited the university's biweekly newspaper.
The idea for East was hatched soon after Koh moved from New York to Hong Kong to work as a political risk analyst in the business development department of Richard Li's Pacific Century Group, where his duties also included speech-writing for Li himself. He spent three months there before being lured to a position at the Hong Kong office of Asia Inc. as head of the magazine's research department (he remained Li's speechwriter for another 15 months). After less than a year, he moved to Singapore to start East.
'Most editors around this part of the world are on the lookout for good Asian talent,' Asia Inc. editor-in-chief and publisher William Mellor says. 'I wanted to get him on staff and didn't want to lose him, basically. At the time, Asia Inc. was toying with the idea of a lifestyle sort of magazine. Although Aun is young, he had some pretty interesting ideas - he believed he knew what Western-educated Asian readers wanted. He's a self-confident young guy and he's well connected. I guess the only limitation is his lack of experience.' Koh doesn't seem to register his lack of experience - in fact, he seems to think he has plenty. While studying at Columbia he worked as an intern on the launch issue of Time Out, New York, spent time in the International Herald-Tribune's Paris office, and secured a plum position as an intern at the New York office of Newsweek. 'I paid my dues very early on [in New York],' Koh says.
East's appearance on the magazine scene seems to fit nicely with the much-hailed cultural renaissance of Singapore - at least according to a recent Time cover story. But Koh says that, rather than succumbing to any nationalistic urge, he chose to establish the magazine in Singapore simply because there was less red tape.