Profile | Hong Kong art gallery owner who went from film to photography to opening Blindspot in Wong Chuk Hang
- Born in New York, Mimi Chun moved to Hong Kong when she was five. After she chose to study film at university, her father didn’t speak to her for six months
- She later got into photography, and decided to open a gallery as there were few contemporary art galleries at the time dealing with the medium
I was born on Christmas Eve in New York. My parents both escaped from the Cultural Revolution in China and relocated from Guangzhou to Hong Kong in the late 1960s.
They thought they should give their children a backup plan for the future and that’s why I was born in the US and became a US citizen. My mum’s older sister had moved to New York in the late ’60s, married and settled there. So my parents moved there in the ’70s.
My dad didn’t have a chance to go to university in China but he managed to learn English in Hong Kong, where for a time he shared a flat with Michael Taylor, an American journalist who had also just arrived in Hong Kong.
The two did a language swap. My dad taught Michael Mandarin in exchange for English lessons. My mum left school early and never had an opportunity to learn English.
