Inside knowledge
Tsang is certainly smooth. Having grown up with some knowledge of the inside workings of Hong Kong’s film industry, he is adept at navigating potential landmines and online barbs while maintaining a smile on his face. Tall and handsome, and famous in Hong Kong as an actor who appeared in more than 50 films before directing his own, Tsang, who is 41, seems simultaneously humble and glamorous as he describes his life and family, from his half-sister, the Taiwanese singer and actress Bowie Tsang, to his wife, the actress Venus Wong, whom he married in a Japanese forest in 2019. He is hardly square. In place of wedding bands, Tsang has nine lines tattooed across three fingers of his left hand and Wong has six lines across two fingers of her right hand, representing their wedding date, September 6.
Ron Wan & Mildred Cheng
“Tell them about your rugs,” Wan teases as he gives Cheng a playful nudge in the arm during a recent visit to Sheung Wan co-working space The Hive. It seems Cheng, who moonlights as a painter, has just purchased a tufting gun so she can turn her trippy artworks, some of them bordering on the erotic, into rugs.
“A lot of my personal work is based on psychedelic experiences,” says Cheng, a 27-year-old vegetarian who goes by the alias “I Ride Dolphin” on Instagram. She is simultaneously head-in-the-clouds and sharp-as-a-tack, and received her bachelor’s from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD)’s former campus in Hong Kong in 2017. Despite being relatively new to the field, she has already been commissioned by Zheng Mahler, the Hong Kong-based artist-and-anthropologist duo of Royce Ng and Daisy Bisenieks, to design their book,
“This is my creative outlet,” Alex says. “It’s almost like my side hobby. I used to joke that, hey, Bruce Wayne sits in a boardroom all day and at night he beats up criminals. I sit in a boardroom all day and at night I design handbags, which is a lot more glamorous, but a lot less heroic, let’s just say.”
When he moved back to Hong Kong six years ago, he says, “I was a middle-aged man with a gut and everything, but I got into boxing and somehow managed to box that away.” For a recent photo shoot, he got himself down to eight per cent body fat. While he normally takes inspiration from vintage styles, he likes to experiment as well with ideas that even he describes as “wacky”, like the Lucia, which came to him while he was training.
Exploring Boundaries
And yet, here is the unlikely sight of Jiaravanont standing before a desktop covered with vintage-inspired bags of his own design, including a bell-shaped shoulder bag, a fanlike tote, a tweed backpack and a streamlined duffle-shaped carryall. His favourite style, he points out, is a sculptural leather pouch attached to a ring handle that looks roughly like a boxer’s speed bag it’s named the Lucia, after the Dutch prize fighter Lucia Rijker.
“This is my creative outlet,” Jiaravanont says. “It’s almost like my side hobby. I used to joke that, hey, Bruce Wayne sits in a boardroom all day and at night he beats up criminals. I sit in a boardroom all day and at night I design handbags, which is a lot more glamorous, but a lot less heroic, let’s just say.”