Hong Kong free skatepark's owner believes in giving back
Entrepreneur, designer, actor, musician and skateboarder Julius Brian Siswojo reflects on life's lucky breaks
On an average Tuesday evening, seven floors up a nondescript Kwun Tong industrial building, about 20, mostly young, Hongkongers are skateboarding, and displaying widely divergent skill levels.
There's concentration and seriousness alongside the fun and obvious camaraderie; at weekends parents bring children as young as nine. It helps that the venue, 8Five2 indoor skatepark, 3,000 sq ft of ramps, rails and quarter pipes built to professional standards next to a shop of the same name, is entirely free to use.
The reasons it's free, apart from sponsorship by sportswear brand Vans, is Julius Brian Siswojo, aka JBS, Sir JBS, or just Brian. The skatepark is the fulfilment of a dream for him - but then Siswojo is used to seeing his dreams come true. The park aside, he also owns the shop and another like it; he's a successful streetwear designer under his own Know1edge brand; as a member of Hong Kong hip-hop collective 24Herbs he has worked with the likes of Nas and Snoop Dogg; as an actor he has shared sets and screen time with Keanu Reeves and Aaron Kwok Fu-shing.
It probably wasn't quite the future Jakarta-born Siswojo was expecting when he moved to Hong Kong at the age of 11 in 1985. "All I spoke was Indonesian, and my parents, especially my mum, said you've got to learn English," he says.
"At that time you couldn't go to an international school in Indonesia if you had an Indonesian passport, so in 1985 me and my elder sister moved to Hong Kong, lived with our aunt and went to Royden House on Caine Road, which was the cheapest international school.