‘If I ask what their dreams are, they can’t answer’: Eric Lau on choosing a creative career
Lau is now a designer and senior art director at a New York ad agency, but he didn’t discover his passion until he’d exhausted a few other obsessions first
As a secondary school student at Wah Yan College, Kowloon, he once told his physics teacher: “Studying all this is useless. I want to do design work and none of this is relevant.”
However, Lau, now 29, became close to that teacher while he worked on his early designs on school computers, and he still visits that teacher whenever he returns to Hong Kong from New York, where he now lives.
One of those early design projects was the cover of his school yearbook, which looks like a record player with a tone arm made from Lego. The idea is that secondary school life is like Lego: you can try all sorts of things, such as sports or music, and if you don’t like the result, you can always start again and try something else.
Later, Lau left Hong Kong to study at the Parsons School of Design in New York, and is now the senior art director at the ad agency Sparks & Honey. He is hosting his first solo photography exhibition in Hong Kong until January 15, featuring his street photography from across North and South America and the Caribbean.
