"In the Mood of Photography" – Interview with Wing Shya

"Everything works, just be honest to explore
what you want sincerely."
(Wing Shya)

 

From "Shanghai" by Wing Shya in the Louis Vuitton Fashion Eye collection 

Each of us has our own personal rankings, on books, photographers, music, or movies. The list of the first three films, books, CDs are often made ... I have mine too, although it's not easy to choose. But when it comes to movies, without a doubt, Wong Kar-Wai's “In the Mood for Love” (2000) is the first to top the list. 

From the first day it was screened in Italy, I was kidnapped. I confess that the first time I did not understand the story well, too stunned by the beauty of the images and music.

So, I bought the DVD and watched it continuously, I think about ten times now; also going to look for everything he had produced before this film.

When I started the courses “Photography as Cultural Mediation” in 2013, I had a lesson dedicated to everything that was extra-photographic, from painting to film, everything that could educate the eyes of photographers, and this film was a must for the students. For its exceptional, magical photography.

 

More than twenty years have passed since the release of that masterpiece, and only in this month I get to know of the existence of a photobook authored by the photographer of that film: “Shanghai” by Wing Shya. Having received it at home, leafing through it, was a blow to the heart. What a beauty!

I was able to contact Wing Shya and ask him for an interview.

With great kindness he accepted, talking at length about his work and the backstage of that film that changed his life.

Exclusively for my Blog.

 

Wing Shya by William Furniss

 

So, Wing, first of all, thank you for agreeing to be interviewed. It will be like a chat between friends. Many people are curious about your work after my enthusiasm for your book. Let's start with some information about you, your city, your studies, how your passion for photography was born, and when you understood that it would become your profession.

I was born in Hong Kong in the 60s to an immigrant family, like many other people from Hong Kong. My family was very poor that I had lived in sheds along the hillside until I was 3 or 4 when one time a typhoon devastated my home and my family was settled into a building in the neighborhood. So, learning about art or picking an art-related profession has never been an option by default, as Asian parents would not regard such as “money-making”.

But I’ve never been a bookish child; I’ve always been the rebel who would go against any wish my parents had for me. When I was a teenager, I saw the movie “Boat People” directed by Ann Hui, in which the actor George Lam plays a photojournalist. I found this character exceptionally appealing and thought to myself that I would like to learn photography because I would look just as cool.  

During a school holiday, when my friends went on partying or dating, I started a part-time job at a 24hr photo studio learning how to print photos, and saved some money to get the exact camera George had in the movie. By this point though, photography had never been truly a passion; it was more like a form of art language to me.

My true endeavor for art developed through my later teens when I failed to progress academically in the traditional school curriculum. I’ve never been very bright with studying; words and languages have always been my weakest link as schooling in Asia mean lots of recitations of materials and learning to spell. This drawback, therefore, had pushed me to seize my chances in art-making because only by means of this I could realize my potentials.

After a couple of years of technical college training in graphic design, I came to see the glass ceiling for pursuing an art education in Hong Kong.  Like many Asian countries and especially back in the 80s/90s, art had never been a mainstream study that was approved of. Therefore, we actually lacked the nourishing ground for those who were like me, who yearn to know more about art to develop further. Bearing this thought, I was determined to find my way to study abroad in the pursuit of art. 

I came to learn about art director, William Chang’s alma mater, the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design by chance. And because the institute was state-funded, so even for international students at that time we could enjoy a lower tuition rate; as a typical “poor student”, it was my only lifeline. I work extraordinarily hard in order to save up for my studies because my parents had told me that there was no chance for me to count on them at all.

During my time in Vancouver, I also took up multiple part-time jobs to cover my costs of living and tuition. However adverse the situation was, what’s most important was my time spent as a student at Emily Carr; it was more than just eye-widening. I can say it was life-changing. I’ve learned to see things very differently, developing my own philosophical sense of the world rigorously only within a few years of time. I came to understand why William Chang went to this school to study art, and what art really meant to me.  

During this period of time, I was determined to become a good graphic designer and to rebel against the traditional point of view that were often seen in Asian countries. I even further my pursuit in typography that some of my teachers would ask me to give lectures on the golden ratio! It was definitely something that made me feel proud of when I was awarded “Student of the Decade” by the school.

After graduating, I was going to start a graphic design studio with my school friends, called “Pentagram”, which later on became extremely successful.  But I was not any part of the success, as I decided to travel back home to create something new at that point. I felt a call when Siaw the mainstream Hong Kong magazines still bearing the very conventional aesthetics; I wanted to create visual challenges for this city that I was born and raised in. It was a very ambivalent feeling because the process of studying art and being stimulated as an art student has always been very romantic; what is presented in reality though isn’t. I felt that I had the mission to share my progress and what I have learned with this harsh reality of Hong Kong.

So, I came home, facing the harsh reality by first painting some toy models in a small shop for quick cash before I had landed a job in the art department for a big advertising company. But I did not stay long, for being a young “rebel” I was often confronted by the harsh reality of compromising my “work”. When I wanted to move on, I was lucky enough to have run into my best friend from the technical college period, who now was the hottest radio DJ, Jan Lamb. He helped me get a job at this prominent radio station that allowed me to get in touch with “commercial art”.

A radio station was only another stepping stone, but it opened many other doors for me in the coming years. The music industry was booming at the time in the early 90s, and there were countless CD albums released each month. Some other friends of mine wanted to start a graphic design studio in light of this, so I was hired to be an art director/designer for this design studio for another few years, producing only music album covers, posters, or other prints. 

It was also during this period of time that my best friend, Jan asked me to do my first photo shoot. He was dating a female singer at that time, and she needed something quick for her new album. So, I had my first try without knowing. I’m only able to connect the dots now in hindsight: the seed for photography has actually been early-seeded, but it wasn’t until this point in my life that photography became something dominant in my life, and by then I still had no idea. Then, the rest is history.

Shu Qi and Daniel Wu (Image: Wing Shya)

 

“In the Mood for Love”, for me, is the film at the top of the list of masterpieces and I never tire of watching it. Indeed, as I mentioned to you, in my Photography courses I recommend all students to watch it at least once. How did you meet Wong Kar-Wai and how did your collaboration start?

As I stopped with “the rest is history” in the first question, Wong Kar-Wai marks the beginning of this “history” without a doubt. After being hired for the very intense music album productions for a few years, I moved on to start my own studio in the year 1997. I named it Shya-la-la Workshop. But I was quite broke at that time because I left the previous job without warning and I was always living from paycheck to paycheck. I brought a couple of my staff with me to start Shya-la-la, and when I was panicking about the funding of the company, I came across two “saviors”. The first was a lady, whose name is Florence Chan. She was going to hold a musical called “Snow, wolf, lake”, and when she knew that I had to raise funds for my company, she offered me a check so that I could rent a small office and buy new computers to start working.

The same year, I met Wong Kar-Wai. I was invited to his office to talk about the possibility to work for him to do still photography for “Happy Together”; they told me that my photos looked “strange” but have got some “substance” in them. So, they wanted to have a try on me. But I had to be away from home for 3 months in Argentina for the shoot when actually the entire crew has flown there already ready to begin shooting.  

I was more than thrilled to have received his invitation, but at the same time being away for 3 months means that my company would have fewer resources to work on projects for this amount of time — which at that time the music industry was crazy! Three months could have meant over 60 albums produced!

After struggling with this for a while, I still chose to fly to Argentina, and by the time I was there, I knew that I’ve made the right choice. It was not the most pleasant experience. And indeed, if you ask any practitioners who work in the film industry in this part of the world, they would agree.

You stand by at the most inhuman hours, and stay awake for 22 hours straight before you could get some rest for perhaps 4 hours. Insanity it sounds, but it was true. However, to me, it was a very unbelievable experience because being away from home and also living under this sort of time pressure seemed to have traversed me to my days being an art student.

Apart from taking still images for the movie (which I had little idea at that time), I worked extra hard to compensate for my lacking of skills in photography. I would print my shots right away in 3R photos and photocopied images, and cut and paste them on scraps. I even picked from the trash on set for anything related to the movie to include them in my collage works. I would stack the pieces of collage under my shower to stain them.

By the end of this movie journey, I’ve produced over a hundred pieces of collage, and Wong Kar-Wai was surprised to see them. But to me, I was only trying my best to give because I knew that I screwed up a lot of still-shooting. It all began when I brought my camera with main my luggage all the way to Argentina, and I was sent to the movie set right away after landing. I did not know what to do as I had never seen people shooting a movie.  At that time, they were shooting an important scene of Leslie Cheung having an emotional time. I took out my camera right away, and shamefully I had very little knowledge of the camera at that time — I was even shooting on auto-mode!

I took close-up shots at Leslie until he was completely annoyed because of the shutter sound. He yelled at me, I apologized but kept going with it — because it was my only chance! If I couldn’t produce good shots then it means I failed as a still photographer. Until a point when Leslie was losing it, he provoked me “Why you have to keep doing this to distract me?” I told him “It’s ok if you’re upset or you yell at me. But if I don’t have my work done, I would be screwed and I wouldn’t be able to sleep.” Leslie let out a sigh of relief and patted me on my shoulder.

I was lucky enough to be understood by an actor regardless of my horrible and unprofessional photography practice. I was unprofessional enough to not know that I should be using a silencer for shooting movie stills. Therefore, with most of my stills for “Happy Together”, the shots were either very wide (I had to hide away) or a little off (I could only click the shutter before rolling or after it was cut). People from the film crew helped me order a silencer upon my arrival, but it didn’t arrive until the day we left Argentina!

So, I started off a journey full of errors with Wong Kar-Wai, but it was some lovely stories of a clueless young lad like me who was offered a chance to take up this sort of responsibility by chance. And knowing that it was a great chance, I gave it all my best to seize it.

Finally, when it came to the time to design the poster, we came up with over 100 designs for this movie. However, Wong Kar-Wai ended up choosing one randomly — the one that is now widely used in the cyan tone with the two characters rolling on the rooftop. Shooting this image was another great story —and it was mainly due to the shutter sound again— that I had to move all the way to another rooftop to shoot them. You would have never expected this legendary image was actually created in such a scattered manner.

From "Shanghai" by Wing Shya in the Louis Vuitton Fashion Eye collection

 

In your opinion what is the secret charm of this film? What inspired you in the making of this masterpiece?

I’ve recently revisited “In the Mood of Love” watching the 4k restored version. That being said, I saw it on an IMAX screen. Now after 20 years, I’ve grown in age and spirit-wise. I am stunned by the very details that both Wong Kar-Wai and William Chang had made an effort to show. Looking at it now, I reckon that it is a masterpiece, but if you ask me about my feelings as a much younger person 20 years ago: I didn’t know of it as a masterpiece at all. I was invited again to work for WKW, and there I went. I believed in my heart, and I just followed the path that my heart has laid for me. So, there was no thinking about “making a masterpiece”, and such a thought has never been on my agenda.

 

You mentioned to me that your passion for art extends beyond Photography. If you had to make a list by choosing three authors you love and who inspired you the most in photography, music, painting, and literature, which ones would they be?

William Chang – he’s the most influential person to me in art-making, as I have mentioned his name a few times in this interview already.

Godard – he broke through a lot without intention. He has a pure soul; you can see it through his works.

Anselm Kiefer – the poignancy in his painting reflects his history genuinely. You can feel him via his works.

 

The colors, their warm tones, are – in my opinion – the hallmark of your work in Photography. What do colors represent for you?

Colors represent my feelings and style. But the application of colors is infinite. My still photography as a certain style that reflects the mood, like a theme; but such an application of colors is not limited to this. Colors can be completely useless. Just like water that changes state. It all depends on how is it applied to serve what needs.

I had the immense pleasure of holding the copy of the book “Shanghai” in my hands. How did you come up with the idea of this book that mixes the atmosphere of the film, fashion, art and Shanghai?

Honestly, I did not have a lot of input in this book because it was conceived by a designer friend of mine who is based in Shanghai. I only supplied him with the materials that he needed with putting together the book.

 

Last question. I read an interview from you that the most important thing for you, aesthetically, in Photography is to create and destroy continuously. I was intrigued by this dimension which refers to Greek philosophy. Explain it better, please. And what advice would you give to those who are approaching Photography now, and feel it could be their destiny?

Personally, to create and destroy continuously seems to be my destiny. Therefore, I feel like I always burn myself down in the process of creation. I do not want to stick to a single style; I would like to have fun with photography. So, whenever there’s a “style”, I tend to destroy it. This seemingly “modus operandi” actually is a reflection   of   my   personality, and   it   doesn’t equate to how photography should be. For those who are approaching photography now, there shouldn’t be a question like this asked because photos are a big part of our lives. There is so much about photography especially with the booming of social media nowadays. One’s destiny is yet to be fulfilled by one, therefore I honestly do not have any advice for anyone, or feel like what could one’s destiny be. After all, this entire interview is “for your information” only; it has little to do with anyone else other than me.  Do not take my words seriously lest affected by them.

 

Where is it possible to see your works?

Website: www.wingshya.com

Instagram: @wingshya

 

Thanks again for your time.

 

From "Shanghai" by Wing Shya in the Louis Vuitton Fashion Eye collection

Wing Shya: “Shanghai” (Louis Vuitton Malletier, 2016)