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Peter Neville-Hadley

Henry Steiner, just turned 90 and with a major exhibition of his work about to open at Hong Kong’s M+ museum of contemporary culture, is regarded as the grand old man of Hong Kong graphic design by those who know him.
But when we meet in person at his discreet office in Hong Kong Island’s Mid-Levels he turns out to be anything but grand.
He is upright, thoughtful and precise in his answers to questions, but gentle-mannered and softly spoken. His voice carries no trace of his Austrian origins, only of his upbringing and education in the United States and his more than 60 years of residence in Hong Kong.
The man and his work are both difficult to place.

His designs, from the HSBC logo found on airport jetways worldwide, to Standard Chartered banknotes, have no obvious common quality or any visible tic. And while his work is seen every day, the man remains a far from public figure.
He finds this invisibility satisfactory.
“I want them to look at these things and think that’s this company, not that this is Henry Steiner. I’m not into self-aggrandisement.”
But the specialists have long had their eye on him.
“I’ve been at M+ for 10 years now,” says Tina Pang, the museum’s curator of Hong Kong Visual Culture. “And as soon as I started working here, I realised there was great interest in Henry’s design work.”
In her view, the small, professional audience that calls him the father of graphic design in Hong Kong is perfectly correct. Although Steiner continues working, M+ already has his archive, from which most of what will be on display in Henry Steiner: The Art of Graphic Communication has been drawn.

“M+ is a global museum,” she says. “We don’t only do things that are to do with Hong Kong.” And the exhibition will help make that point.
Other subjects of forthcoming monographic exhibitions include the late Chinese-American architect I.M. Pei, Chinese fashion designer Guo Pei, and American photographer Cindy Sherman.
Steiner is characteristically modest about joining such company, and about his work being enshrined in a museum as an academic resource to be picked over and written about into the future.
“It’s a home,” he says with a shrug. “I’ve spent my career here, and I’m happy that [the archive] is going to be in M+. I’d like people to be able to see what I’ve done, and [to] make them think, ‘Would there be other ways of expressing this?’”
He has said that a designer is only as good as his client, although he declines to name any examples, good or bad.

“I did have the thought of having a company called ‘The Client’s Wife’ because then I could say, ‘Designed by the client’s wife’. I find that a lot of clients aren’t visual at all. They say, ‘I’d like to study this overnight’, but what they want to do is to show it to their wives because they’re artistic.”
Although the language of branding barely existed earlier in his career, it is now on everyone’s lips. Have clients become more sophisticated?
“There was less symbolism in the old days. You had names written out. They were verbal rather than visual. It’s something that is hard to explain sometimes to people who aren’t visually oriented – a lot of them tend to be more numerical.”
But the process of creating a logo has not changed much, he says.
“It’s sometimes called the ‘a-ha’ moment. That’s it. It’s just some people are visual, some are numerical, and some are verbal. And you want to get something that’s on the back of a truck, for instance, that you see and you know what it represents.”

The HSBC logo, an adaptation of the 160-year-old company’s original flag, was intended to be geographically and culturally neutral, devised as it was to give a common identity to a rapidly expanding network of acquisitions in territories around the world.
If there is an individual quality for which Steiner is known, it’s the creation of corporate identities that simultaneously address Chinese and Western audiences, and the adaptation of existing Western designs to ready them for entry to the Chinese market.
Pang cites the logo of the now-vanished Hong Kong Hilton Hotel.
“It has this outline that can be read in multiple ways. You can think of it as Chinese wooden lattice work. You can also think of it as the Chinese character for longevity.”
Steiner’s career has its roots in a time when physical objects had to be shopped for and placed in photographs, and when the tools of a designer included a drafting table, cutting board and scalpel. He’s worked through the early days of desktop publishing into the fully digital age, but admits a continuing resistance to machines, except for correspondence.

“I work with a pencil or whatever, and I find that much faster, instead of setting something up on a computer.”
He has staff to scan his sketches where necessary, which historically, says Pang, have quite often been done on hotel notepads. He jots down words and designs whenever and wherever they come to him.
Has he otherwise changed with the times?
His book-strewn office is also lined with posters for events long past, including one for an environmental conference in Kyoto showing the anguished visage of a sculpture forming the contours of a garbage bag.
There is also one of the Hong Kong Designers Association’s Design98Show. This reproduces Francisco de Goya’s 18th-century provocative nude, La maja desnuda, in uncompromising juxtaposition to a Chinese calligraphy brush.
“There are many things that Henry did that today wouldn’t be possible,” says Pang. “There’s definitely an element of exoticisation; definitely an element sometimes of objectification of women. And that would be very difficult to do now.”


Steiner demurs, but acknowledges that even at the time the Goya design “caused a bit of a stir”.
But this does mean that the exhibition, in incorporating such works alongside his magazine layouts – including that for The Asia Magazine – and much more, will also chart changes in the traditional culture of the city, and in its social mores.
“We want to focus on M+ as a repository for the Henry Steiner archive and indicate that this is a resource for researchers … to access his work,” says Pang.
Those with a more everyday interest in graphic design’s impact on their daily lives will also enjoy Henry Steiner’s Hong Kong, published by Zolima CityMag this month, and will discover that they are more familiar with his work than they thought.
“It’s a deep dive into Steiner’s work, the impact it had on Hong Kong, and how Hong Kong influenced him,” says Christopher DeWolf, co-author with writer-designer Billy Potts, both of Zolima.

As the book shows, Steiner’s impact on Hong Kong was felt not only in the presence of his designs in everyday life, but in branding, such as for retailer Dairy Farm, that acknowledged both the growing economic power of Chinese businesses and the importance of Chinese consumers to colonial enterprises.
His designs gave both Chinese and English versions of corporate identities equal weight or fused Chinese and Western elements together.
“It’s obvious now to always have Chinese elements if you work in Hong Kong, but at that time, in the 70s and 80s, it wasn’t quite as common,” says DeWolf. “He incorporated them into an international, modern, Western framework.”
A much more personal, and sometimes even playful, Steiner can be seen in magazine covers and items such as stationery, menus and company annual reports, he says, which will be visible both in the 200-page book and at the exhibition.
Steiner is still busy at 90, and the term that Pang says is often used to describe the HSBC logo might perhaps also be applied to the designer himself.
Indestructible.
Henry Steiner: The Art of Graphic Communication opens at M+ on 15 June.


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Architecture and design

Father of Hong Kong graphic design Henry Steiner, 90, on his exhibition at M+ museum

The HSBC logo designed by Henry Steiner is widely recognised. Photo: Yik Yeung-man

Henry Steiner, 90, the creator of logos for HSBC, Hong Kong Jockey Club and Dairy Farm, and the subject of a show at Hong Kong’s M+ museum of visual culture. Photo: Jonathan Wong

Henry Steiner designed the iconic HSBC logo. Photo: Yik Yeung-man

Packaging for Amoy peanut oil (1972), designed by Steiner. Photo: M+, Hong Kong

The cover of the December 1961 edition of The Asia Magazine, designed by Steiner. Photo: M+, Hong Kong

An undated photograph of Henry Steiner in front of The Hong Kong Hilton Hotel. Photo: Maynard Frank Wolfe

Steiner was design director of The Asia Magazine. This cover is from an edition from 1961. Photo: Henry Steiner

Henry Steiner was behind the branding for Hong Kong retailer Dairy Farm. Photo: Henry Steiner

Steiner’s controversial Goya design for the Hong Kong Designers Association’s Design98Show. Photo: Henry Steiner

The cover of Henry Steiner’s Hong Kong, published by Zolima CityMag.

Yoko Ono, Bong Joon-ho, Zhang Peili and a whole lot more in indie film festival at M+ museum in Hong Kong

A still from Nick Deocampo’s Oliver (1983),  part of the first Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival at the M+ Museum in Hong Kong, which tells the story of a gay female impersonator who stages a provocative performance of bondage and escape. Photo: Nick Deocampo

Wing Shya, a photographer known for his collaborations with film director Wong Kar-wai, is the art director of the first Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival, held at West Kowloon’s M+ museum. Photo: Wing Shya

Musician Nnscya will create an experimental soundscape to accompany Wing Shya’s unseen 35mm film photographs in “Phantom Frequencies: An Audiovisual Experience by Wing Shya x nnscya”. Photo: Nnscya

Touch Me, Touch Me Not brings together nine films focusing on the body and its emotional physicality. One of the films included is Patty Chang’s “Fountain” (1999), a documentary of a performance about self-representation and the female body. Photo: Patty Chang/ M+

In the Fearless & Fierce: The Female Gaze programme, Indigenous Australian artist Tracey Moffatt’s Mother (2009) draws on intense maternal relationships portrayed in classic Hollywood cinema and TV dramas. Photo: Tracey Moffatt/ Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

Part of the Fearless & Fierce: The Female Gaze programme, Mako Idemitsu’s narrative-within-a-narrative Kiyoko’s Situation (1989) depicts the deeply rooted cultural roles of Japanese women through the parallel lenses of two female artists, Kiyoko and Tani. Photo: Mako Idemitsu/ M+

In the Slivers of Desire with Nick Deocampo programme, Roxlee’s Juan Gapang (Johnny Crawl) (1987) portrays a man covered in white paint and crawling through Manila, the Philippines. Photo: Roxlee

Yau Ching, Ellen Pau and Wong Chi-fai’s Here’s Looking At You, Kid! (1990) is featured in Self x Society, which looks at experimental films exploring the paradoxes an individual faces in society. Photo: Videotage

‘We bring culture to your city’: gallerist on his Hong Kong woes, private equity, and an eyebrow-raising costume

PARIS, FRANCE - OCTOBER 23: Emmanuel Perrotin and Takashi Murakami attend the Opening of the 40th Edition of the FIAC International Contemporary Art Fair at Grand Palais on October 23, 2013 in Paris, France Photo: Getty Images

French gallerist Emmanuel Perrotin and Japanese artist Takashi Murakami attend the FIAC International Contemporary Art Fair at Grand Palais, Paris, France, on October 23, 2013. Perrotin has galleries in Paris, Hong Kong, New York, Seoul, Tokyo, Shanghai and Los Angeles.  Photo: Getty Images

Perrotin at his gallery in New York. Photo: Perrotin

Perrotin in 2018. Photo: Tanguy Beurdeley

Alice Lung is a partner at Galerie Perrotin. Photo: Double M Workshop

People visit an exhibition of Kaikai Kiki artists at Perrotin Shanghai on March 18, 2021. Photo: Getty Images

A view of French photographer and artist JR’s exhibition “Pattern” at Perrotin Hong Kong in 2012. Photo: Perrotin / Laurent Segretier

Perrotin and Murakami at the opening of the exhibition “Murakami Versailles” at the Palace of Versailles in 2010. Photo: Getty Images

Perrotin with Tornado (2017), a work by Jean-Michel Othoniel. Picture: Guillaume Ziccarelli

A view of the exhibition “Perrotin Presents at K11 Musea: ‘Servitudes’ by Jesper Just” at the K11 Art and Cultural Centre in Hong Kong. Photo: Perrotin / Ringo Cheung

Warhol, Basquiat and Banksy paintings sell but spring art auction sales in Hong Kong fall

Hong Kong auction houses are feeling the effects of the global slowdown in art sales, with many big name paintings, including by Warhol and Basquiat, not making their estimates in recent spring sales. At the Christie’s 21st century evening sale, Andy Warhol’s Flowers (1965, above) sold for HK$55 million. Photo: Christie’s

Native Carrying Some Guns, Bibles, Amorites on Safari (1982) by Jean-Michel Basquiat sold for HK$83 million at Phillips’ modern and contemporary art evening sale on May 31. Photo: Phillips

Jonathan Crockett, chairman of Phillips Asia, selling Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Native Carrying Some Guns, Bibles, Amorites on Safari (1982). Photo: Phillips

Yayoi Kusama’s Pumpkin (2000) sold for HK$11 million, less than its presale estimate. Photo: Phillips

A work by the late artist Matthew Wong, Shangri-La (2017, left), was withdrawn before Christie’s 21st century evening sale. Photo: Christie’s

Wimbledon 1 (2011) by American artist Jonas Wood went under the hammer for HK$1.6 million against a HK$2 million to HK$4 million estimate. Photo: Phillips

Lifestyle

Arts & Culture

Steiner, who designed logos for HSBC, Hong Kong Jockey Club and Dairy Farm among others, reflects on his career as museum shows his work


The creator of logos for HSBC, the Hong Kong Jockey Club and Dairy Farm, and designer of Hong Kong banknotes, Henry Steiner, 90, talks about a show of his work at M+ museum and his 60-plus-year career.


M+ museum of visual culture

Hong Kong

HSBC

Hong Kong Jockey Club