Wai Wong

Different from most of my peers, I will say that I want to be a printmaker instead of an artist. More precisely, I want to be a craftsman or an artisan focusing on making prints. Ozu Yasujiro is my favourite movie director, and probably my favourite artist. In an interview, he once said, “I only know how to make tofu. I can make fried tofu, boiled tofu, stuffed tofu. Cutlets and other fancy stuff, that’s for other directors.” Because he spent his entire career to make nothing else but “tofu”, he made the best “tofu”. Ozu probably did not consider himself as an artist, but a craftsman who repeatedly practiced the same craft until he reached perfection. This is what I want to be – a tofu maker; a craftsman in printmaking. Except through practicing the same craft repetitively and constantly, I do not know any other way to achieve perfection.