Photographer and filmmaker Yonfan talks retirement and Wong Kar-wai

I don't dare to use the term aesthete to refer to Wong. People use that term to describe perfect images, but it carries negative connotations. My 12 articles on him in Fu Hwa explain why his movies are so exceptionally good. Many people have written about him before. However, I am satisfied with what I wrote. I don't mind you calling me an aestheticist … as a matter of fact, you can call me anything.

I had been writing a column for Next magazine for two years. In the first year, I wrote fiction. In the second year, I wrote 60 articles, which have been collated into two books for publication. The first one is Fu Hwa. Writing a book and writing for magazines are two different things. So for the book, I added in pictures and a postscript that was not published in the magazine. The postscript is about my thoughts after writing the columns. I think the postscript is an even better read than the articles. The book has travelogues from Rome, Paris, Turkey and South America. The travelogues are combined with my experiences, like when I made movies in Singapore.

The second book is Liu Jin. It touches on Hong Kong movies during their heyday of the '60s. There are eight articles on [late Chinese director] Li Han-hsiang. I also wrote about the popular stars during Li's time, such as Li Lihua and You Min, with whom I am personally familiar. It goes on to talk about Chinese opera, the West Kowloon Bambook Theatre, Bak Shuet-sin and [late Chinese-born Japanese actress and singer] Yoshiko Yamaguchi. It's very operatic. By the end of the book, I wrote about Chow Yun-fat, Cherie Chung Chor-hung and Brigitte Lin Ching-hsia.