Put It On a T-Shirt
Meet Dominic Johnson-Hill, artist, raconteur, and former owner of the coolest t-shirt shop in Beijing (possibly China), who has found a new home in the wilds of Hong Kong
Back in 2004 I was new to China, and had just landed my first media job at a magazine called City Weekend. Although I was based in Shanghai, the head office was in Beijing, and so one sunny afternoon I found myself boarding the overnight train to the capital, a 12 hour journey which can now be done in under five, thanks to high speed rail.
I'd been invited to stay with a colleague called Laura and her husband Dominic, who lived in the middle of a hutong with their young family. It took the taxi driver a while to find the lane they were on, a then little known lane called Nanluoguxiang. I recall having a very fun rooftop dinner somewhere, and then spending the evening with their friends in the notorious bar district of south Sanlitun, knocked down long ago.
The next day, Laura and Dominic took me to eat at a restaurant by Houhai, the lake at the center of the city, me hanging on for dear life to the back of his black Chang Jiang 750 sidecar, which traces lineage to the 1940s. It was a truly memorable weekend, and although I was soon to move onto a rival magazine called that's Shanghai, I continued to hear about Dominic through his Plastered 8 custom t-shirt and art shop, a free-spirited start up that eventually came to encapsulate the opening up of 2000s China.
Sadly, in 2022 I heard that the store had finally closed, only for Dominic to soon resurface in Hong Kong with a new art gallery, new home in the countryside, and a new direction. Intrigued, I reached out to find out more - and about how his time and journey in China has shaped him so far, and what he hopes to achieve in the future.
Hi Dominic, thanks for agreeing to this interview. How's life in Hong Kong?
Life is incredible here, we moved in 2019 and arrived in the middle of the chaos of the protests, then Covid hit and then all the political changes here so a lot happened in a very short time. Having lived in Beijing since 1993 we were used to change though. The dust seems to have settled now and there’s a new normal of sorts.
It’s a great place to be an artist, which is my only role now. Leaving the mainland was tough for us all (we have 4 daughters) but this was what we called our “soft Chexit”, as we are still in China and can easily get back with cheap flights so it wasn’t a big cultural shock at all.
I see you now live in Mui Wo, how do you find life on Lantau?
Blimey. I could never have imagined that I’d live in a rainforest next to a beach with an incredible community and only a 30 minute ferry ride from the centre of bustling Hong Kong. When Covid hit everyone on our island stayed put, we had no lockdowns and we all got to know each other really well. We made a lot of friends and that’s really what has made Hong Kong such a great place for us.
Life can be quiet but also hectic, you can jump between the two, but I always wake up in quiet and go for hikes into the mountains in the early morning. We lived in the hutongs in Beijing, which felt a like a little flat village in the middle of a huge city of 20 million that was incredible too. In short, I f****** love it here in HK right now.
I remember a Hong Kong colleague once remarked to me that 'foreigners' in HK eventually escape to the countryside - Sai Kung, Lamma, Lantau. Do you think that's true?
There’s a lot of foreigners here doing so many things and it really struck me when I first moved here, I was wondering what they were all doing. I remember when I left Beijing it used to be a conversation stopper when I said I’d been in Beijing for 27 years, but that’s very normal here. In fact, you meet ‘foreigners’ who are third generation born and bred Hongkongers.
Hong Kong has an amazing outdoor culture, foreigners and locals all love to get out and hike the trails on the weekends, it’s like the British rambling culture really took hold here.
I'm not sure if you're aware, but according to author Larry Feign, a former village resident, Wang Tong may have once been the seat of imperial power in China. Does it strike you as the kind of place that could have sat in for Beijing?
It certainly doesn’t give that vibe now, but I love the idea of this.
Speaking of the capital, what finally brought about your move from Beijing to Hong Kong?
This was a really tough decision for us as our daughters were all born and raised in Beijing, I met my wife there, was fortunate to have some incredible successes and witness in many ways Rome being built. Life was so stimulating each day it felt like something absurd and crazy might happen and it usually did.
That being said, my life in the creative world was becoming quite challenging, censorship is always changing and you never knew when you might upset someone. The brand had had a great run and I wanted to end it on a high.
The schools and lifestyle in Hong Kong were much better for our teenage daughters and my wife had been offered a job with her company down here so we made the jump and we are bloody glad we did. I had to spend a year in the mainland during Covid to wrap up my business and sell our apartment and that was one f***** up dystopian time that I’m glad the family didn’t have to go through.
Could you provide readers with a bit of background about how you ended up living in China, and why you stayed so long?
I came to China from India in 1992 after 3 years of backpacking, to visit my brother. I saw massive opportunity everywhere, went up to Beijing, lived with a Chinese family, learnt Chinese pretty quickly as I was so immersed and did odd jobs like teaching English. Then I started my first business in 1995 doing market research all over China.
I fell in love with the country, the adventure and felt that if I applied myself I could do well as an entrepreneur. China was a full rebrand for me, with a new language, new name, and becoming an entrepreneur. I was the quintessential “loser back home”, and I was lucky. I never expected to stay almost 28 years in total but China does that to you. Beijing will always be a home for us.
You created Plastered 8 (I believe with your last bit of savings), what was your hope for the shop and brand, and do you think you achieved your goals?
To be honest I had no real plans, I just opened a t-shirt shop (because Beijing had no cool t-shirts then) right outside my home on a quiet hutong (we were the first creative store on Nanluoguxiang). Ten years later it was the busiest retail street in Beijing, attracting over 100,000 people a day on public holidays.
The pressure of having a shop window really pushed me to reinvent, to market, to find talent, I don’t think I would ever have started a brand if I knew how much work there was ahead of me, but I loved it.
This brand opened up my world to so many opportunities: I became a TV presenter, an artist and spoke at universities all over China, I still can’t believe what happened.
So in answer to your question, I achieved my goal of opening a shop and then had a life changing journey that I feel made me a stronger and better person today. Business in China is tough, I was fortunate to find a niche where I had some advantage, kept my business small and profitable, and had a ton of fun.
I was down Nanluoguxiang earlier this year and tried to find the hutong where you lived and where the shop was, but was swept along by the huge crowds. The same thing happened when I visited old Chengdu, Xi'an and Shanghai. Do you think that China's massive spike in domestic tourism is in danger of overwhelming the distinctive character of laneways?
This happens all over the world. Artists move into cool areas, they become popular, businesses move in and the area loses its edge, get overcrowded and become pretty s***. In China it’s on crack though, with so many people, so much generation of wealth in such a short time, it’s inevitable.
I was lucky to meet so many people who had come from the countryside to Nanluoguxiang to visit my store, wonderful people who were so excited to be traveling to these spots and see new things.
The hutongs are unique in that they still have residents so they are in many ways living museums, but those old residents are moving out now and new wealthy types have moved in. Call it progress.
Moving on, tell me about the Wang Tong Art Walk. What is your goal behind it? And what are the challenges of running an outdoor art gallery (I feel that wandering water buffalo might cause a hazard, let alone dogs, snakes and more)?
Much like opening a t-shirt shop without a plan, I started to hang artwork I’d found in the bins on the walls of an abandoned home next to my house. Then, when the weather destroyed them, I printed some of my own weatherproof artwork. It became a thing and people started to visit.
It was very organic, and it’s nice as it’s outside my home and I get to meet people from all over Hong Kong and talk about art. We get typhoons (and yes, lots of snakes), and the extreme weather keeps me changing things up. We now have hidden sculptures in the forest, it’s quite magical.
Speaking of wildlife, your bird project ‘Flock’ is rather interesting. What is the motivation behind painting these huge likenesses on walls? And how do you match a bird to a location?
Well, I saw a big wall of an abandoned house outside my living room and thought it would be nice to have a giant local bird mural on it, found a talented artist, up it went and so many people started sharing it on social media. Then I started walking my island home Lantau looking for more abandoned houses.
A local ornithologist gave me a list of local birds and now it’s my mission to have them all painted. We now have eight birds in different locations and on some weekends attract over 100 people a day, who go on special hikes just to spot the birds, like a treasure hunt. It’s been such a rewarding project, we’ve been featured in some media, and I’m now doing a crowdfunding page to do another 10 in September.
Each time I find a new location I spend some time there, and wonder which bird would be most at home on this canvas. I consider the colours of the walls, its surroundings and then find a suitable bird. It’s loads of fun and thus far everyone loves it, which is a change from my own art that can get some harsh reviews from people visiting the gallery, but as they say, “good art divides”.
I'm curious to know more about your other work? The ‘Re:Urgent’ exhibition looked especially anarchic.
‘Re:Urgent’ was a collection of five local artists, three of whom are street artists and don’t show their faces and I got to collaborate with them - it opened up new opportunities for me. Being subversive is a lot of fun, I see it more as being naughty and playful but of course there’s limits to how naughty you can be here, which you find out as you go along.
The re-mastered oil paintings of old classic Hong Kong artwork sold really well, which I felt were quite an obvious idea as its been done before. ‘Monster Control’ is about giant monsters living in modern Hong Kong under so much control they can no longer behave like monsters and instead do menial jobs. I personally love this collection but it certainly wasn’t a commercial success.
Of course, you still have your t-shirts. Where have you found inspiration in Hong Kong?
I love creating t-shirts much more than framed mounted art. T-shirts are a very informal playful canvas and they’re affordable and people wear them out like billboards, so you get to see them again. I see ideas everywhere for t-shirts, local icons, Hong Kong’s obsession with money, it’s all fun stuff for a t-shirt. I’ve actually spent the last 20 years of my life thinking about t-shirts designs, it’s a nice way to live.
How would you compare the art scenes in Hong Kong and Beijing? Hong Kong is trying to position itself as a global art hub with Art Basel, the Affordable Art Fair and other major events. But is the local art scene growing to match?
The Beijing art scene in the 1990s was explosive and all very new to China, it felt like a revolution of sorts, include the music scene too. Most of this energy was dampened out through too much control or over-commercialisation, leading to what it is now. I feel so lucky to have been witness to that and played my own small part in it.
Hong Kong has a very established scene, s*** loads of galleries and a lot of big money behind it. I’m still quite new to it but it feels quite small when you consider how much local talent there is here. That said, Hong Kong is only home to 8 million people, whereas Beijing felt like it was a centre for art for the whole country back then, so it’s hard to compare.
Art Basel feels like a giant supermarket for overpriced art and it’s not curated, so I’m not so inspired. Affordable Art has some fun stuff but it’s also not curated into an experience and you don’t know the story behind the art so it feels like you’re just buying wall decoration.
What are your next major projects? And is Wang Tong home for the foreseeable future?
I’m thinking of going back into retail with a Plastered store in Hong Kong next year. Having a physical store is like having a gun to the back of the head to recreate all the time, and I’m the type that needs this pressure otherwise I get lazy.
It’s a tough game retail, especially in Hong Kong where rents are so high, but I’m hoping the venture might pay off with creative output and I might break even. Otherwise I’m continuing with my bird project Flock and experimenting with my outdoor gallery.
I still can’t believe what a great life I have here. All that adventure and a lot of luck and timing really paid off.
Fabulous - it's great to compare the hutongs with village life in Hong Kong, I'd never though of it like that before but there are indeed some similarities.
Great interview. Really captures the essence of Beijing back then, the opportunities that could happen in such a time, and the joy of finding rainforest and a beach. "Chexit" indeed.