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Before Dominic Johnson-Hill started a Hong Kong art walk, he was a star on Chinese television

The entrepreneur behind irreverent brand Plastered 8 talks about serendipity, celebrity, and leaving his colourful mark on Hong Kong

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Dominic Johnson-Hill in front of a mural featuring a yellow-browed warbler in Mui Wo, Lantau Island. Photo: Jocelyn Tam
Chris Dobson
I’M ONE OF FOUR SIBLINGS and the only one born in England, in 1972. My sister was born in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, my brother was born in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and my other brother in the Philippines. My father was in tobacco, so he travelled all over the world. He met my mother, who was with the Foreign Office in Bangkok. Then they lived in Chiang Mai, Kaohsiung, Tanzania and Manila. My grandparents met in Hong Kong at the Happy Valley racetrack in the 1930s, so I have a family history of being overseas.

I WAS VERY UNSUCCESSFUL academically. When I finished my A-levels and didn’t do very well, I got a job in Zimbabwe on a tobacco farm, thanks to my dad. I then went to South America and travelled all around, getting a few odd jobs along the way. I went to India and got a job in a hotel in Rajasthan, and that was one of the most influential three years of my life, because I started believing in a sort of serendipitous opportunity in meeting people, before mobile phones or anything like that, and wonderful things kept happening.

Dominic Johnson-Hill in Kanyakumari, the southern tip of India, in 1992. Photo: courtesy Dominic Johnson-Hill
Dominic Johnson-Hill in Kanyakumari, the southern tip of India, in 1992. Photo: courtesy Dominic Johnson-Hill

I MOVED TO BEIJING IN 1993 and lived with a Chinese family illegally where the third ring road is now. Their house was very small and didn’t even have a door on the toilet. I woke up at six o’clock on the first morning and the retired couple were standing over my bed watching me sleep. Beijing was flat and grey and I didn’t speak the language, but there was a lot of opportunity. I learned a lot of Chinese and they looked after me like I was their son. It was an incredible experience.

Dominic Johnson-Hill at the Great Wall in 1992, on his first visit to China. Photo: courtesy Dominic Johnson-Hill
Dominic Johnson-Hill at the Great Wall in 1992, on his first visit to China. Photo: courtesy Dominic Johnson-Hill

I STARTED A BUSINESS IN 1995 monitoring the trade of retail products in the north of China. Basically, it consisted of taxi drivers, who were the only people with cars, people who owned kiosks and people who worked in wholesale markets. I’d buy a taxi driver a fax machine and he would drive to these places, collect the information, fax it to me in Beijing in raw handwritten form. I would process it into a fancy Excel document and sell it to a foreign company. I don’t know anything about numbers, but I was selling numbers to big companies because no one else was doing it.

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I MET MY FIRST WIFE in Beijing in 1999. She’s an author called Mian Mian. We had a daughter, Prudence, and then we separated. I lived in Shanghai for a year as a DJ, then I moved back to Beijing after travelling around the world with Prudence. I met Laura in Beijing in 2003, got married and we had two kids, Winnie and Rosie. We then adopted a daughter from outside Wuhan in 2010. I stayed in Beijing until 2019 and then I was going back and forth from Hong Kong.

Dominic Johnson-Hill stayed with a traditional Chinese medicine doctor and his wife in Hunan province in 2018 as part of his China travel show. Photo: courtesy Dominic Johnson-Hill
Dominic Johnson-Hill stayed with a traditional Chinese medicine doctor and his wife in Hunan province in 2018 as part of his China travel show. Photo: courtesy Dominic Johnson-Hill
IN 2004 WE MOVED TO a quiet hutong in Beijing called Nanluoguxiang. We lived there with a bunch of other residents and then I decided to open my first T-shirt shop, Plastered 8, on the street in 2006. All I did was take subway tickets and put them on T-shirts, thinking this is all I know as I’ve never done art in my life. Then I started to build the brand.
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Nanluoguxiang is now probably the most famous hutong. So we went from a couple of hundred people a day passing through to, 10 years later, when I was the deputy head of the Chamber of Commerce for the area, getting 100,000 people a day. Only in China.

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