It was not the first publicity campaign organised by the Hong Kong government and it would not be the last, but it was certainly the most memorable. In 1972, when Lap Sap Chung – literally, Rubbish Worm – lumbered into the limelight, leaving a trail of trash behind him, he entered the city’s consciousness. In theory, he was a green, spike-tailed monster, with sparse strands of red hair, whom everyone was encouraged to hate because of his filthy ways. Instead, generations of children managed the dual feat of growing up with (relatively) tidy habits while loving a loutish litterbug . His creator was an Englishman called Arthur Hacker, who arrived in Hong Kong in 1967 and died here in 2013, aged 81. Hacker liked to say that, being himself a red-haired foreign devil, Lap Sap Chung was a self-portrait. For years, he worked in the Hong Kong Government Information Services Department, usually referred to as GIS. (The initials, so journalists used to claim, stood for God Is Speaking.) There he produced, in civil service anonymity, posters for many sober campaigns: anti-smoking, anti-drugs, anti-pollution. Some of these are now in the M+ Collection and can be seen in its exhibition “Hong Kong: Here and Beyond” . The off-duty work, however, was less restrained. Hacker’s office job was to tell Hong Kong’s citizens how they should behave, but in his own time he staked a visual claim by observing how they actually did. When his first book of drawings came out in 1976, with text by David Perkins, it was called Hacker’s Hong Kong . From a froth of flourishes and curlicues, an exuberant place and its people emerged. His style was so distinctive – caricature, yes, but soft-edged – that, once you saw it, as the title promised, you started to view the streets through his eyes. Hong Kong was, Hacker explained, “a pop-art city” and he wanted to portray its “sweet side”. It’s true that some of the Wan Chai ladies (whom he called his “dahlings”) look more sour than sweet as they eye up hulking American sailors but you feel the artist’s affection. “His sketches put a rather bewildered ancient civilisation alongside the echo of the British lion’s roar and wrap it all up in a disco dim sum,” wrote Derek Maitland in The Correspondent , the Foreign Correspondents Club magazine. Bruce Lee, Michael Hui and other film stars in nostalgic photo exhibition The FCC was Hacker’s second home; he designed its former logo, his imprint still twirls on some of its crockery and a statue of Lap Sap Chung is displayed in the Main Bar. Now an exhibition is showcasing both the professional and personal aspects of Hacker’s creativity. Being held at Ping Pong Gintonería in Sai Ying Pun, it was organised by owner Hugh Zimmern, who was brought up in Hong Kong and is an admirer. “In the 1970s and 1980s, his work was all over the city, on stamps and posters,” he says. “And looking back at his drawings reminds me of the crazy layering of Hong Kong street life: Wan Chai girlie bars during the Vietnam war, tattoo and mahjong parlours, tai tai s, old men in PJs doing congee runs…” On a recent afternoon before the opening, Zimmern is at the Hong Kong Design Institute in Tseung Kwan O, sorting through Hacker memorabilia he’d like to borrow. He never met Hacker; neither did Keith Tam, head of the HKDI’s Department of Communication Design, nor did lecturer Kaman Tsang, nor did John Wu, graphic designer and avid collector, who has donated much of his large Hacker collection to the HKDI. But the air is thick with nostalgia. They’re all nodding and smiling, collective memories ignited. Nearby, a Lap Sap Chung doll is lying on a table. There are Lap Sap Chung bags and photos (grinning government officials with brooms). There is a Lap Sap Chung Discredit Card that states: “Hand this card on to the next person you see dropping litter.” It’s not known how many inhabitants had the courage to employ this social tactic and the purple-and-yellow card looks pristine. “The highest contrast on the colour wheel,” says Tsang, admiring the visual choice. Miss Super Clean, the goody-goody of the campaign, wore a purple-and-yellow checked hat and miniskirt, plus purple knee-high boots. She was soon trampled into the dust by Lap Sap Chung’s popularity. The HKDI archive also has some of Hacker’s posters for the Festival of Hong Kong. In fact, there were three festivals – in 1969, 1971 and 1973 – involving every district in the colony. That huge government project was a response to the 1967 riots, in which 51 people died in Hong Kong as the Cultural Revolution was revving up across the border. Its stated mission was to propel the city into the modern age. “The Festival was British propaganda,” Wu, the donor, says cheerfully. “It was to say – you are not Chinese, you are a Hongkonger! And it was to tell the world, ‘Come to Hong Kong.’” Hacker designed the festival’s logo, which looks like a cross between a lollipop and a beach ball. Its futuristic orange swirls were both psychedelic and psychic. They represented what a press release then referred to as “the Hong Kong orchid”; this was the bauhinia which, in 1997, would become the official emblem for China’s new Special Administrative Region. As it happens, the 1967 riots had delayed Hacker’s arrival in Hong Kong by several months. He’d applied for the job of the Hong Kong government’s art director while he was working in London as the Evening Standard newspaper’s artistic director. He’d come from an artistic family. His great-uncle and namesake, Arthur Hacker, was a well-known English painter and Royal Academician. His maternal great-great-grandfather was an English architect, Charles Lanyon, who designed most of Belfast’s Victorian-era buildings, including the city’s jail, university, courthouse, custom house and – in the botanic gardens – palm house, all of which still stand. His mother, Carla Lanyon Lanyon,, born in Northern Ireland, was a poet. His soldier father, Edward, eventually became a brigadier general and Arthur, the youngest of three children, would describe himself as “a British army brat”. (His elder brother, George, a retired bishop, and his older sister Carlotta, a children’s author, both survive him.) After London’s Royal College of Art, he freelanced as a scenery painter for pantomimes and strip clubs, which might be seen as ideal training for work in government and Wan Chai. Although he spent a year as a designer at Philips records, most of his pre-Hong Kong career was at the Evening Standard . Among his posters, the M+ Collection includes one he did for the newspaper’s series on the contraceptive pill, which was about to become legal for unmarried women. He used it as an example when he wrote a how-to article for young designers: “Aim for simplicity. Aim for impact. Aim for originality .” At first, the colonial government’s campaigns, and yearbooks, kept him busy. By 1976, when Hacker’s Hong Kong came out, he calculated that he hadn’t done a drawing or painting for five years. But its success encouraged him to sell his own prints. As the Ping Pong exhibition proves, with its early drafts and collages and sketches, it was never hack work: he was painstaking about what he sent out for public consumption. He revised and redrew continuously in his flat, alone. He always said that he never married because he didn’t want the tiresome business of divorce. In 1983, he produced a limited edition of Arthur Hacker’s Cartographical Extravaganza of Hong Kong , “a hundred amusing drawings in elegant curlicue style”. The longer he lived in Hong Kong, the more he wanted to acquire of its past. He collected old stamps, photographs, rare books. In 1989, Historic Postcards of Hong Kong from the Private Collection of Arthur Hacker MBE was published. In 1997, as the handover approached, he wrote The Hong Kong Visitors Book – A Historical Who’s Who and Arthur Hacker’s Wanchai in which he set down Hacker’s Law: whatever you predict about Hong Kong’s future will be wrong. In the same year, Wattis Fine Art in Hollywood Road published his Hong Kong: A Rare Photographic Record of the 1860s. “There was a lot of shouting and screaming,” remembers Jonathan Wattis, who has been selling Hacker’s work for years. “He had this booming voice … But he was meticulous. It was a great project, a legacy of Arthur in a way. He was always diligent.” His last book was British Hong Kong: Fact and Fable – A Cartoonist’s Alternative History of the Crown Colony , which came out in 2006. When he died, seven years later, his flat was crammed with his drawings and his hoard of Hong Kong memorabilia. The clearance, by friends, took about a year. It turned out that, unlike his old pal Lap Sap Chung, he couldn’t bear to throw anything away. Arthur Hacker at Ping Pong Gintonería opens on May 12 and runs until July 10. Tuesday to Sunday, 6pm to 10pm (and by appointment).