His viral cat photos snapped in Hong Kong shops saw him take the idea to China and on to dogs gr
I was born in The Hague, in the Netherlands, in 1964. My dad worked for Philips, the electronics company, as a product designer and we moved to Eindhoven, where the Philips headquarters were, when I was seven.
My dad used to do photography in his spare time. He’d develop his own black-and-white photos, so he was kind of an inspiration. At primary school, when people would ask what I wanted to be, I’d say a designer and I didn’t even know what it meant.
From the age of 16 to 20, I studied printmaking in Eindhoven and then I started working for Philips. I was doing the lettering on products and the job grew into broader graphic design on packaging.
Packing up
I always had a fascination with Asia. Both of my grandfathers were musicians and I got into music in a big way, and some of the pop musicians I was crazy about – Freddie Mercury, the British band Japan – had a thing about Asia. And my dad used to go to design conferences in Japan, he’d oversee production in Singapore, he’d travel to Hong Kong and Malaysia.
Then, my parents moved to Taiwan for two years in the late 1980s with Philips. I didn’t live there but on my first trip to Asia, in 1989, I did a two-month trip. The cool thing was, after staying with my parents, I went to Hong Kong where Philips had a tiny design department. When they heard I was coming, they said they’d pay for my hotel if I came into the office every day.
I showed up at the Royal Garden with a backpack and a guitar, and in my room I had stationery with my name on it. In gold. And, if you’re from a small town in the Netherlands, the skyline was crazy. The same thing happened when I went to Singapore – I worked in the office for two weeks. I thought, I want this kind of life. Back in Eindhoven, I was doing work on packaging that was produced in Singapore. They were looking for a graphic designer, I put up my hand and was transferred there at the beginning of 1992.
Moving on
After three years, Philips wanted me to move from Singapore to Hong Kong. The team had expanded by then; I had to lead 10 graphic designers and I made an agreement with myself that I’d do it for a maximum of three years. In 1998, I quit and I moved back to Singapore to start my own business.
I often think back to why I did that because now I so love Hong Kong. But in those days, I didn’t have the confidence. Hong Kong is a tougher city, a harder city, than Singapore. Hong Kong was great to visit; Singapore was great to live in.
On January 1, 2000, I started a creative collective called Chemistry with a couple of graphic designers. That’s still running. The advantage of a collective is you have a lot of freedom and I took a sabbatical in 2008, which is when I got into the photography thing. I started an ongoing series called “Residue”, very arty photography – I use a glass panel to reflect buildings into weathered walls, capturing impermanence and change in a very esoteric, dreamlike way. I never really returned completely to work.
Hello Kitty
After I went through a fairly amicable divorce, I moved back to Hong Kong, in 2015. My ex and I had had four cats. One had just died, 20 years old. Her name was Kim, I’d found her in a flowerpot on Kim Seng Road and she’d lived with me in Singapore, Hong Kong, then Singapore again. After we split up, my ex kept the other three cats in Singapore. It was the only period in my life since I was 10 that I didn’t have a cat at home.This is why I started spotting them in shops. You have an extra affection for them because you miss your own cats. I’d rented a flat between Sai Ying Pun and Sheung Wan on Hong Kong Island. I’d have coffee at Winstons and in a shop opposite was Dau Ding – he was probably the first one I saw, he was on the cover of the first book. I remember taking a photo with my iPhone. Then I saw one nearby in another shop, then another.
I never knew it was such a big thing here. I photographed four or five, not even doing it with a proper camera, and made a little folder on Facebook of Hong Kong Shop Cats. People really liked that.
Feline Groovy
I started going out with my camera and also finding out if there was already a book on it. There are a couple of photographers who’ve done books on every subject imaginable in Hong Kong and I’m very lucky they didn’t think of this one. Hong Kong Shop Cats was published at the end of 2016. By that time it had gone viral on the internet – first in the rest of the world, then in Hong Kong. We sold the first edition of 1,000 books in the first week.
I knew Hongkongers would like it – this is about Hong Kong, it’s their city. A lot of Hongkongers have thanked me. They’ve said, “Oh we always walked past and never thought about it and you framed it in a way that made it a thing and now we’re very proud of it.” But I was baffled by the international attention.
Chinese Whiskers
Then I was wondering – is it really a Hong Kong thing? Or is it the southern parts of China, where you get more mice and rats? Or is it an all-China thing? Quite early on I started to do trips into the mainland. I went to Guangzhou and found shop cats everywhere. I did a trip to Shanghai. I asked some friends and they said, “Maybe there’s a few in the fruit stores.” And I actually found lots but only in the old areas. This is why it’s become such an important thing for me.
I went to 10 cities for Shop Cats of China. You find these cats only in the old places; and the old places are disappearing a lot quicker in China than in Hong Kong. What did China people think of me? … A lot of the time, when you’re paying attention to cats, they’re quite amused. They’re tickled, let’s put it like that.
I had a friend translate about 10 questions, plus an introduction, into Mandarin. If they say yes, I press record on my iPhone and let them talk about cats. There was a really beautiful white cat, actually in Macau, in a provisions store and they’d found out from the security camera that upstairs, where the storage was, there’s also a black cat, it catches mice, too – and they’ve never seen him. It’s almost like the underworld, an alter ego. He never comes down. But he is there.In China, the background can be quite different from Hong Kong. Maybe it’s a hardware store. I have a beautiful photo in a religious store with a Guanyin and a cat next to it. Sometimes in China, I have a feeling they just get them for companionship; in Hong Kong it’s a practical thing.And there are more varieties of cat in China. In Hong Kong, it’s brown stripes, white paws, a European shorthair type. In China, you get more pedigree cats, more fluffy, Persian ones.
Dogmatic
After three editions of Hong Kong Shop Cats, I took it back from the publisher and did two editions under my own company. And I released Hong Kong Garage Dogs (2018). Not as good … it’s still in its first edition. As a photo project, it’s fascinating but they’re guard dogs in garages, sometimes on a chain and they’re mean-looking. I think the cat calendar that year outsold the dog calendar by a factor of three.
A dog person said to me, “Oh, us dog people don’t need all that memorabilia – that’s for you cat people.” It’s also true that when you’re a cat person, you love all cats. When you’re a dog person, you’ll like Labradors and hate the small ones or you’ll like the cute ones but not the big ones. There’s a lot of racism going on in the dog world.
I also did Hong Kong Market Cats but it was less of a happy premise, it was more grungy. When Thames & Hudson offered the contract to publish the Hong Kong book (as Shop Cats of Hong Kong), I took the best photos from Hong Kong Market Cats and put them in, too. There are so many tales you could tell about this part of the world but this is like an unknown love story.
Yes, I have two now – Alley, because she was found in one. I share her with a friend. And Rizo, short for Risotto, who came from an adoption agency.
Shop Cats of China was published last month by Thames & Hudson.
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