When a Canadian says he's just bought a photograph of Hong Kong for his flat, one doesn't expect to be taken to a local art gallery down a back alley in Mid-Levels, or to find that it is a picture of a construction site at Victoria Harbour. Where's the archetypal skyline picture? Why should you be interested in a land reclamation project and the immortalisation of buildings labelled for destruction?
As it turns out, the constant rebuilding and renewal that Hong Kong has become so famous for is the perfect analogy for Andrew Work's life in the city. He says he flew halfway round the world for love and one expects some clich?d romance story involving a heroine being whisked away to a fairy-tale dreamland, but in the same excited voice he uses to describe and trace the tiniest details of his new purchase, he tells of a very different sort of love affair.
After meeting his then wife-to-be in Canada 13 years ago, he followed her over 9,600km to Hong Kong, where he fell in love all over again. This love was no one-sided affair. His passion for the vitality and culture of Hong Kong has been matched by the city's passion for him - and as director at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, some of the other 220,000 expats living in the city he now represents. So has it always been like that?
'You know I have embarrassed myself in this city, but what I love about it is that I've learnt that people really respect you for carrying on.'
He has launched an independent economic think-tank, a failed business, and lunched with some of the most respected businessmen and incoming trade ministers in town. It was following the collapse of his doomed enterprise, and the subsequent 'embarrassment', that he recalls a lunch meeting with two prominent entrepreneurs.
'They told me that they had piled large amounts of money into bad investments and that it was nothing to be ashamed off,' he said. 'You don't have to be embarrassed about taking chances and falling down. In Hong Kong all you've got to be embarrassed about is if you don't get back up. This city is extremely forgiving to those taking honest chances.'