Think of a romantic city and it’s unlikely that your heart or mind will turn to Taipei, its five-floor walkups and higgledy-piggledy streets, a mix of gravel-gray and algal white tiles, with an occasional flourish of modernity or quirkiness. No, your eyes will inevitably turn to Paris, Shanghai or New York. Even Hong Kong.
One of the imaginers responsible for making over what used to be a place famed for its love of money but little else into a city of romance is the illustrator Jonathan Jay Lee. His graphic novel style transforms Hong Kong’s agglomeration of malls and high-density housing into a world of intimate attachments, sepia-tinted nostalgia and of course beautiful women.
It’s no mean feat. You could agree with Oscar Wilde that in such a case, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” The thinking here being that since Lee is a commercial artist, his work creates a message that follows a script, corporate or government line, much like advertising or public relations.
Photo courtesy of Jonathan Jay Lee
“After I returned to Hong Kong I wanted to change its image for people from other parts of the world. I wanted them to see what I saw, a really vibrant, efficient city. So I romanticized it.”
Drawing on Western comic and Japanese manga influences, especially Takehiko Inoue and his samurai graphic novel Vagabond, along with the fantasy sci-fi style of Moebius/Jean Giraud, Lee has created a signature look. He uses photos for reference, building a visual vocabulary, like drawing those ubiquitous iron bars on Chinese-style apartment windows, pipes and electric cables dangling, air cons, washing hanging out of windows.
The trick was not to make Hong Kong look like somewhere else, but be uniquely itself.
Photo courtesy of Jonathan Jay Lee
Hong Kong is glossy and well groomed, even if it’s just a street scene. There’s a hyperreality, so what is true and what is imagined blends and there’s no telling what’s what. In the end you just admire and your perception of Hong Kong shifts slightly. The city’s tourism board must love him. He’s achieved the herculean task of making Hong Kong sexy with just pens, pencils and crayons.
In no way would you think that Lee’s work imitates life, or seeks a realistic or naturalistic expression of the facts on the ground. It’s far more stylized, emotionally charged, just like the work of one of his favorite filmmakers, Wong Kar-wai (王家衛) — the director behind In the Mood for Love and 2046.
The 31-year-old is one of the “new Chinese,” equally adept in the West as the East. He’s also another artist from the great Taiwanese diaspora.
His grandfather was a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) judge and general in Nanjing, one of the warring wave of migrants who retreated to Taiwan in 1949. His mother was born in Hong Kong, but was looked after by her grandparents in Tainan. His parents met when they were working at Texas Instruments in Taipei and left for the US in the 1970s to chase the American dream, before relocating once again to Hong Kong.
Like the majority of kids born to “tiger parents,” his own dream of being an artist wasn’t an option to begin with. “I totally understand and know where (my parents) were coming from when they didn’t take me seriously about pursuing the arts. Given their social circumstances and how they were brought up, that actually applies to almost every culture from the baby boom generation … It’s not that the arts are unappreciated, it’s that it’s unrealistic.”
Asked to identify himself, Lee calls himself American, “from Hong Kong,” or Taiwanese-American, so it is fluid, in step with a globalized, citizen of the world ethos. A graduate of Parsons School of Design in New York, he made it there, but he could make it anywhere.
“When the day comes and I can rely purely on my reputation then in theory I can be based anywhere.”
Lee says he would have preferred to stay in New York, but circumstances found him going back to Hong Kong.
“Looking back, I totally don’t regret it. The scene was really competitive and inflated, surviving took a lot more and started weeding out those who didn’t want it badly enough.
He says that surviving in Hong Kong was less costly and making a reputation for himself a lot easier.
“It definitely wasn’t easy, but in certain ways it has paid off and there are interesting things happening here. Hong Kong is not my ‘all-or-nothing’ city, I think I love it because it returned some love back to me when I hustled to the point of near-defeat.”
Now that he’s in a good place and has a strong resume he can afford to turn down clients. He’s worked on The Punisher, for Marvel, the sci-fi mag Heavy Metal and a number of other comics, provided illustrations for South China Morning Post and ad campaigns for big beer companies, HSBC and plenty of other blue-chip clients from around the world. He’s also held a number of solo exhibitions of his work.
As intimated, Lee has thought long and hard about reality and appearances. At school in the Midwestern US, he was taught it was the greatest country in the world and GI Joe pretty much won World War II on his own. Learning later that the US didn’t get involved in the war until later came as a shock.
“I thought the States was the center of the world, but a lot of this was movies made in America.”
Another wake-up call was being educated about the Opium War in what was then colonial Hong Kong. UK-schooled teachers didn’t want to admit the British were basically a drug cartel forcing the Chinese to buy drugs, but instead made out that it was a trade war about selling fruit and vegetables. It was Lee’s mother who put him straight.
When he went to study in New York, Lee expected the city to be as romantic as a Woody Allen film, but found the trash stank just the same as anywhere else, the cockroaches were bigger and totally fearless, McDonald’s wasn’t as good as Hong Kong and the people were kinda lazy. Though he later learned to love the Big Apple, this disconnect between truth and fiction remained. Paris disappointed, too.
“We have seen New York a thousand times but not Asian landscapes, they’re usually badly done or faked, so [Westerners] don’t get it right.”
Asked whether this meant that art focused on Asia rather than the West was more interesting because there’s comparatively more going on, Lee says: “This is a strange thing to say, but I think the the pendulum has been in the East for a while already, it just took the rest of the world to catch up to that.”
He concedes, however, that “Asia rarely starts trends in the creative realm but follows them.”
Which makes me wonder, after we have spoken, if talented Asia-based artists like Lee went off message, were less afraid of failure and more adventurous, would this change? I guess the answer needed a question.
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