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PostMag
Life.Culture.Discovery.

This week in PostMag: from Little Bao chef May Chow to Gilbert & George in China

Chef Chow talks about what’s next for her after Little Bao restaurant, a new look at the provocative British artist duo’s exhibitions on the mainland in 1993, and a trek through Ladakh’s Markha Valley

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May Chow is a Canadian-born chef who runs restaurants in Hong Kong and Thailand. Photo: Jocelyn Tam

One of my all-time favourite quotes was penned by Walt Whitman: “I am large, I contain multitudes.” It felt like a life raft in the heady days of early adulthood as we began carving out our path – choosing a degree, starting a first job, distilling our interests and expertise into a line on a résumé, and later, a social media bio. All choices that shape who the world sees us as.

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It felt good – defining and establishing ourselves – but there was low-level, deep-seated anxiety, too. How could we build a life that expresses the totality of who we are, not simply one narrow slice?

And I was just a university student with no accomplishments of note. It’s a predicament that’s heightened with success. In 2013, Hong Kong chef May Chow shot to fame with the opening of Little Bao. For the next decade, she was “Little Bao May” – a blessing, and then eventually, perhaps not a curse, but certainly a constraint. In our cover feature, she tells Gavin Yeung about growing beyond the Little Bao brand and what’s next for her (spoiler: there’s pudding involved).
Throughout the rest of this week’s print issue, we dive into the arts across mediums, time zones and eras. Vanessa Lee chats with American photographer Austin Bell who shot 2,549 basketball courts across Hong Kong. That’s all of the city’s outdoor courts – at least to his knowledge.

In Sydney, Bernard Cohen explores the future-forward retrospective of Beijing-based artist Cao Fei and dives into the exhibition designed by Hong Kong’s Beau Architects.

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“My City is Yours” is on until April 13, if the coming months find you in the Australian city.

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