About the speaker
Billy Potts is a designer and writer born and raised in Hong Kong. The city has always captured his imagination. Trained as a lawyer, Billy started a design consultancy at 26. The consultancy, Handsome Co., would place special emphasis on local heritage and its first project was a series of bags and furniture made of discarded taxi upholstery. Since then Billy has carried on working in this vein, designing amongst many things, two of Hong Kong’s iconic trams, writing about the city’s culture and esoteric folk traditions, and creating visual identities and products for heritage brands like Camel Vacuum Flasks and Ascot Chang.
Favorite quotes from this talk See all
The suit is not a uniform, it's actually an expression of your own identity.
If you would just . . . engage it, there's no telling what it will lead to , where you will end up, you might end up in an Australian country town where everybody loves being Chinese or taking part in Chinese culture!
All these masters fled to our tiny island city, and they started to flourish because they were all together, they were all learning from each other ... so the art elevated to this new level; and even today there is no place like Hong Kong in terms of making dragons and lions.
And what makes an Imperial Dragon is each of these individual scales, and they're made like this... by a guy like this... In a tiny 300 square-foot shop in Shau Kei Wan, a 125 meter dragon sprang forth... Each [scale] takes about an hour to make. And there are 7,000 of them.
There is no telling what will happen when you follow your wonder, when you are curious about things--and you engage with that thing that you were always curious about on the edge of your experience or the edge of your knowledge.
Hosted by
Education First
23/F, Tower 2, Times Square, Causeway Bay
Hong Kong, Hong Kong China
Date
Partners
Savannah College of Art and Design
Fresh Accounting
Redback
Bite Unite
Toki Creative
Cmd Tab Studio
