words yvonne teh
translation Joyce Wong Wing Shan

For people whose lives intertwine with those of the stars, a shop in Marble Road is a touch of heaven.

It is no easy thing to talk to Hung Chiu Chung in his small North Point shop. The premises are so filled to overflowing with postcard-sized photographs, complete with requisite frozen smiles and bright stares, of Hong Kong’s entertainment celebrities, it is difficult to stand in, let alone sit, for an amiable chat. So we left the stars to their own devices and followed Hung, best known as the Photo Shop Man, to the hallway outside, where he has a little stool and often sits while his customers browse. You could say, as much as the shop, that little stretch of hallway is part of his history…

Hung is a former entertainment news reporter who, for close to 16 years and a total of 95 issues, was the publisher and editor of a monthly magazine whose Chinese name translates into English as Hong Kong TV Idols. For some years now, however, he has been the proprietor of
that veritable treasure house, in a nondescript-looking North Point mall, for those seeking photographs – priced at a mere $2 a pop – of their favourite Hong Kong TV (particularly TVB), movie and music stars.
Pictures, never mind words, cannot do justice to how much is stocked within the walls of this little shop whose customers Hung simply describes as “people who love Hong Kong stars”. It is no exaggeration to say Hung owns tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of photographic negatives and prints of a multitude of entertainment personalities, including Cantopop Sky King and TVB actor-turned-movie-star Andy Lau, the shop’s undisputed top seller over the years. The earliest items in his collection date back to 1976, the year the now middle-aged singer, dancer and actress Lisa Wang was TVB’s biggest star!




Hung opened his initial shop back in April 1981, becoming the first person to sell ‘idol photos’ in fixed premises in Hong Kong – previously they were only sold on the streets. According to Hung, there was a time his business was very popular indeed; during its peak years, he actually had to control the flow, and even sometimes restrict the number, of customers into his shop. Also, from 1982 to 1987, his rather misleadingly named Starlight Book Company could boast not just one but four branches. But times change and the shops in Sham Shui Po and Wanchai are no more. And, although he used to operate two shops in North Point, he now has just the one on Marble Road, which he moved to in 1994 from a more prominent location in the Healthy Gardens complex on King’s Road.

Hung attributes the decline in business to a couple of factors largely beyond his control. One was competition in the form of the many who jumped on the bandwagon in the 1990s until there were 26 shops selling idol photos and related items in Hong Kong. Although he takes pains to point out that owners did co-operate and regularly supplied one another with photographs, his profit margins deteriorated once so many other shops entered the picture.

Secondly, he believes that the golden age of TVB has passed and the Hong Kong film industry has gone into decline. “There aren’t too many nowadays,” he says, about local customers. “People have a lot of choice now. They aren’t just watching TVB dramas anymore. Instead, they’re also watching shows from South Korea, Japan and Taiwan. So that’s why this generation of TVB stars are not as big and popular as the previous ones.”

Hung admits that not only are contemporary Hong Kong stars not so popular with his customers (an increasing number of whom hail from abroad and Mainland China), he, too, is not particularly impressed by them. Rather, his personal preference is for the luminaries of a now bygone era. In particular, he nurses fond memories of the late Barbara Yung Mei Ling, a popular actress in the early 1980s, in TVB’s famous 1983 adaptation of Jin Yong (aka Louis Cha)’s The Legend of Condor Heroes. Tragically the actress died in 1985 at the age of 26. And he also recalls Margie Tsang Wah Sin in the 1985 TVB adaptation of the same martial arts novelist’s Flying Fox of Snowy Mountain.
Now in his late 50s, Hung – who has a wife but no children – has, for a few years, been nursing thoughts of retiring. He has stopped adding to his stock (although he has thousands of negatives he hasn’t yet made prints from) and is at his shop for only four hours each day, if that. He has also contemplated permanently closing what he realizes, with some modicum of pride, is “the most classic idol photo shop around” and running a mail-order business instead.

For loyal customers like Brian Naas, webmaster of Hong Kong Cinema: View from the Brooklyn Bridge, a founding member of the Subway Cinema collective behind the New York Asian Film Festival, and an unabashed Asian movie nut who never fails to spend hours in the shop whenever he visits Hong Kong, that would be a tragedy akin to the shutting down of a classic old cinema or even film studio. As he effusively wrote on his Asian Cinema – While On the Road blog some months back, this physically modest establishment is “an astonishing place for HK film fans who like to either collect or simply gaze at pictures of their favorite stars. Or perhaps immerse yourself in them is a better word.”

As for the Photo Shop Man himself, Naas was moved to declare, “In a city that seems to have so little time or patience for its past and often so little regard for its film heritage, this gentleman is almost heroic for attempting to keep this store going and for keeping a small piece of Hong Kong film history alive.” And this even without realizing that, as Hung himself reports, the state of archival media collections in the HKSAR being the way it is, the reporters of more than one local magazine and newspaper use his shop as a resource for photographs of stars, especially from the 1970s and ’80s, because their own organizations’ collections don’t stretch that far back in time!

For his part, it is clear Hung values his establishment’s loyal customers, many of whom find out about him either on-line or by word of mouth. It is a surprising number, yet he warmly remembers not just the big spenders like the wholesaler who, in 1996, bought 130,000 photographs of Leslie Cheung alone, but also those, be they from Mainland China, Vietnam, Japan, Malaysia or the USA, who faithfully return time and time again, sometimes bearing presents from far-away lands, chat and take photographs with him, and – as he puts it – treat him as a friend. Additionally, he smilingly tells us, “I can remember most of my regular customers – not only their faces but what stars they like, what kind of photos they bought before and what style of photos they like.”

From our conversation, one gets the sense that Hung’s interactions with his customers, most of whom, he recognizes, are “buying for themselves rather than for their business”, helps sustain, if not him, then his interest in keeping his business alive. So, too, do the memories of local entertainment personalities who he looks upon as having had genuine talent, star power and charisma. As he makes a point to remind us, “Although very small, Hong Kong has produced a lot of famous films and people. That’s why I have customers from so many parts of the world.”

Hung Chiu Chung’s photo shop is situated in Room 223, Mall 33, 33 Marble Road, North Point, Hong Kong. To get there by MTR, take the train to North Point and then look for the Marble Road exit.