Ad man turned artist Stanley Wong discusses his anothermountainman avatar, the aggressiveness of capital letters, and the sense of loss in his exhibition ‘on hong kong’
- Stanley Wong, who started in advertising, is known for the irreverence of his art and his fascination with red, white and blue canvas widely used in Hong Kong
- He tells the Post about the first photo he took, why ‘the most important thing in life is harmony’, and the images in his latest exhibition, ‘on hong kong’
One day – he thinks it must have been in 1994 – Stanley Wong Ping-pui went to a designers’ lunch. At the time, he worked for J Walter Thompson, then Hong Kong’s biggest advertising agency, and his main account was with the MTR.
“And Alan – very generous, very gentlemanly – would say to all of them, ‘Let me introduce you to the famous MTR Stanley Wong’ and ‘This is MTR Stanley Wong’,” says Wong, one recent morning at the Lucie Chang Fine Arts gallery in Wong Chuk Hang, in southern Hong Kong Island, where he’d arrived by taxi.
“Afterwards, I walk down the street – Wan Chai, Saturday afternoon. And my reaction is: Stanley, if you are not the MTR, you are nothing.”
At the time, the MTR had an advertising slogan (not coined by Wong): Say MTR You’re Almost There. Wong decided he didn’t want to say, or at least hear, MTR when it was attached to his name and so he applied the brakes.
On the Monday morning, he told an astonished J Walter Thompson: no more MTR account for Stanley.
