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.