Artist Stanley Wong on his creative epiphany, positivity and remarrying his wife
Also known as anothermountainman, the artist’s early years were spent in a shack on a Mong Kok rooftop; having cut his creative teeth in advertising, he is celebrating the recent premiere of his first feature-length movie
My parents arrived in Hong Kong in the late 1950s from southern Guangdong. My father was a tailor and my mother looked after us five kids – she never went to school, a typical [Chinese] immigrant.
I’ve got two elder sisters, an elder brother and a younger brother. We lived on the rooftop of an old building in Mong Kok. The walls were made of corrugated iron and my earliest memory is of the ferocious 1962 typhoon that ripped the roof off our home. When I was four, we moved to a public housing estate in Wong Tai Sin that overlooked the temple.
I used to get car sick, so I chose to go to a technical secondary school in Wong Tai Sin – it meant I wouldn’t need to take the bus. I was quiet and shy as a kid. Lots of people don’t realise I’m still very shy because I give a lot of public talks, but that’s because if you are a creative director, a teacher, you need to give presentations.
In form four, I failed my chemistry exam and that meant I couldn’t go to university, so I took a two-year course at Hong Kong Technical College to be a teacher, teaching design and technology. After a year at the college, I applied for an evening graphic-design course at Hong Kong Polytechnic.
It was hard to get in – a few hundred people applied and only 40 were selected. The polytechnic course was meant for working graphic designers and, at the end of the first year, when one of my teachers discovered I was a student, he kicked me off the course. I decided I would show him, I’d get a job as a graphic designer and my classmates at the poly helped me find work.