Category: Art and Design

The Chinese Signboard Calligrapher

Au Yeung Cheong isn’t one for modesty. He heralds himself as No. 1, the crème de la crème, the acolyte of famous Chinese calligraphers. 

His kingdom is a cluttered corner shop in the residential Hong Kong neighborhood of North Point: Fluorescent lights line the ceiling, and scraps of plastic, sawdust, and empty paint cans fill almost every square inch on the linoleum floor. Newspaper clippings adorn the door jamb. It’s not exactly a place you’d stroll past and wander inside to check out, but nonetheless a cluster of people huddles outside late on a Saturday afternoon as the sun begins its descent, peering inside.

Au Yeung’s traditional handicraft can be found plastered across more than 1,000 buildings in Hong Kong if you just look up. He designs, builds and installs signboards across Hong Kong, everywhere from restaurants and jewelry shops to Chinese medicine clinics. The 65-year-old once even stood on the bamboo scaffolding outside a watch store to paint the company’s name onto a signboard.

Handmade neon signs may be the iconic symbol of the city’s visual landscape, but in the 1980s, government regulations and a preference for more energy-efficient signs began transforming Hong Kong’s streets. These days, Au Yeung’s work is primarily acrylic, plastic or backlit with LED lights. Producing handmade signboards is a skill in and of itself, but his use of the distinctive Zan script — a regal style of Chinese calligraphy — is what truly sets his work apart from machine-made typefaces. 

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The Chop Master

Early on a Sunday morning in Hong Kong, nestled away in a pedestrian alleyway in the residential neighborhood of Sheung Wan, one stall among dozens is open. It belongs to Ng Kam Chun, a reserved 57-year-old man whose work most Hong Kongers have likely seen without knowing it.

Ng’s business, like that of all the stalls lining Man Wa Lane, is customized chops — traditional, necessary tools for doing business in Hong Kong, China, and beyond. A chop is essentially a square-shaped seal made of jade, marble, or wood with the owner’s name engraved onto the bottom, which is used to stamp a “signature” on important documents, cheques, and contracts. Chops symbolize a company’s identity, and in many offices are kept in safes.

Every nook and cranny in Ng Kam Chun’s tiny stall, which can fit two people shoulder-to-shoulder if you’re really squeezing, is filled with shelves that hold boxes and boxes of blank chops — slabs of stone waiting to be carved. Ng estimates there must be around 10,000 in there. 

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The Bubble Queen

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“I will never get tired of bubbles,” Yang says.

Since age 3, Melody Yang’s life has always revolved around bubbles. And not the wimpy bubbles that are emitted from a tiny plastic wand that fits in your back pocket. Serious, record-breaking bubbles.

Bubbles run in her family’s blood: Along with her siblings, Yang is one of the stars of the Gazillion Bubble Show, which her father started more than 20 years ago. For every New York show, she uses about 30 gallons of her family’s secret bubble solution; for bigger international shows, she’ll use up to 60 gallons. While she wouldn’t reveal the solution’s ingredient list, Yang did impart some of her other secrets — like how she made the world’s largest bubble (170 feet long) and fit the most people ever inside a bubble (181; it was supposed to be 200, but the shorter kids weren’t counted).

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Hollywood’s Go-To Prosthetics Makeup Artist

“How are we gonna kill that person this week?” is a question that Matthew Mungle would periodically ask himself when working on the set of The X-Files in the late 90s. “I couldn’t wait to get the script to see what monster we had to create next.”

That might seem strange for a man with a terrible phobia of blood, but Mungle’s job is hardly within the realm of normal. Though you may not recognize his face, you’ve surely seen the prosthetic makeup Mungle has done in more than 200 film and TV projects, including Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for which he won an Academy Award. And it’s not just faces: He’s also designs prosthetic pensises, breasts, and pregnancy bellies. “We’re known for realistic-looking work,” Mungle says. “We don’t do too many aliens.”

But the work is Frankenstein-esque in the sense that Mungle hatches new creatures from scratch. He and his team may spend an entire month on one effect, like someone’s hand getting cut off in CSI. That work could be edited together so it’s only on screen for four seconds. But hey, those are still pretty impressive bragging rights.

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Mungle at work on an autopsy body for CSI.

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The Costume Wizard for ‘Hamilton’

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Jennifer Raskopf, in the room where it all happens.

There’s a little show on Broadway right now that you may have heard of — it’s a musical about the life of a Founding Father.

Yes, that’s the one.

Jennifer Raskopf is an assistant costume designer for Hamilton, the show that picked up 11 Tony Awards last night (no biggie). She’s seen the show about a dozen times — or two dozen, if you count shows that weren’t fully staged — has cried every time.

Raskopf helped shop for and do swatching and fitting for costumes for the 28 members of the current cast, from bras to buttons to the king’s cape. Like most typical theater-goers, she has about 30 Playbills sitting around her apartment; unlike most typical theater-goers, she can casually reminisce about the time Lin-Manuel Miranda, who created and stars in the show, started singing DuckTales while everyone was waiting for lighting onstage.

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