How watching Charlie Chaplin silent classic The Kid changed the life of a Hong Kong art gallery founder
- William Kayne Mukai watched The Kid as a young child in Tokyo with his family, and remembers laughing at the slapstick humour in the silent comedy
- He has watched it 15 to 20 times since, and is struck by the poignant scenes mixed in with the laughs; he says it opened him up to art in all its forms
Silent film The Kid (1921) tells the story of an abandoned child’s impromptu adoption by and life with The Tramp, the main character of its writer, director, producer and star, Charlie Chaplin.
Featuring the cinematic legend’s trademark blend of slapstick humour, pathos and social commentary, it is perhaps his most loved work.
William Kayne Mukai, the French-Japanese founder of Hong Kong contemporary art space WKM Gallery, tells Richard Lord how it changed his life.
I was pretty young when I first saw it – about five or six. My family used to rent videotapes; on weekends, that’s what we did.
I grew up in the Tokyo suburbs, and there wasn’t much to do. We would go to get the tapes on a Friday and choose what we were going to watch for the next two days. The act of watching them was such a ceremony – it’s why I have such good recall of this film.
My dad was a big Charlie Chaplin fan – I’m guessing he first watched them when he was a kid as well. This is the first film I really remember all of the family watching together, and us all laughing together.
