What had been a childhood hobby became a profession. Keung learnt the trade from sifu, or masters, then, when he had enough experience, set up his own business. His first solo effort was for the 1976 comedy The Private Eyes, produced by Golden Harvest, for which John Woo was production designer. “That was the first time I did it all on my own. I no longer had my sifu to touch up my painting for me. That was a little intimidating,” he says with a smile.

Every day, Keung woke up at 5am and travelled to different cinemas on Hong Kong Island, Kowloon and the New Territories to paint or deliver posters. If on the day he had to paint posters for a cinema, he would stay there for an hour before driving to the next one. During peak seasons, he would produce eight to ten posters of different sizes a day and end up going home at two or three in the morning. Despite the long hours, there was a definite perk: he was occasionally invited to watch screeners for artistic inspiration.

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Both Keung and Tam acknowledge that fine art tends to reflect an artist’s personal feelings towards and interpretations of its subject matter, whereas for film posters, the artists use their artistic skills to deliver a promotional piece without involving their own agenda.

But Keung believes the latter required just as much creativity. “You had to find a way to summarise the whole movie within one canvas,” he says. “Often, we had to create montage paintings where different characters and scenes were pieced smoothly together through colour choices or how we imagined the scenes might look.” From designing tiny details such as adding rosy cheeks to a beauty queen and enlarging Bruce Lee’s eyes to emphasise his fierceness to coming up with catchy phrases then skilfully calligraphing them onto the poster, artists like Keung had different techniques to attract the audience into the cinema.

Tam says it is thanks to artists like Keung that the memories of many Hong Kong cinema icons stay alive. “Bruce Lee was already dead when I was born [in 1973]. But the movie posters, with his fierce eyes and strong personality, made a lasting impact on me when I was a teenager. I feel that his legacy is still here.”

Read more: Shannon Lee Discusses Her Father Bruce Lee's Legacy And Impact On Asian Representation In Hollywood

At the height of the industry’s success, there were about 80 movie poster artists. But since the 1990s, when hand-painted movie posters started to be gradually replaced by computerised art and digital billboards, these specialised artists have gradually retired or changed jobs. Beyond This Time includes a chapter about the poster of Steven Spielberg’s first Jurassic Park movie in 1993. Keung was sometimes hired by film companies to reproduce existing designs on local posters or other merchandise; Jurassic Park’s was one of them, and was Keung’s last assignment. The iconic stencilled poster with a black T-rex silhouette against a circular red background was designed by artist John Alvin. “It was unlike the realistic and colourful posters where I used to beautify the subjects,” says Keung. Tam adds, “The digital poster design of the Jurassic Park movie was foreshadowing the end of these artists’ era.”

After Jurassic Park, Keung found a job as an art teacher at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, where Tam was a student. It was there that Tam discovered that his tutor had been responsible for many of the posters that had captivated him as a child, and he was inspired to celebrate Keung on stage.

“Movie directors and actors are usually heralded as the key contributors to the flourishing of Hong Kong’s cinema industry,” Tam says. “But these movie poster illustrators were the unsung heroes who shed their sweat and blood in promoting film talents in their works to bring crowds into the cinema.”

When Chow was cast in Theatre Ronin’s production In the Mood for Red last year, he learnt Tam shared his enthusiasm for the cinema, and they decided to tell Keung’s story. Beyond This Time will be the first time a Theatre Ronin production will be based on a true story, after 16 years of adapting literary titles for the stage—including the works of romance writer Eileen Chang, Newman Prize for Chinese Literature winner Xi Xi and, in May, George Orwell’s Burmese Days.

“To me, all valuable human stories are literature,” Tam says. The theatre founder believes that Keung’s life story isn’t only about movie posters but the journey of the artist’s self-discovery and a reflection of the city’s art and film development. “How Jimmy works and adapts to the changing of the times make great lessons for his students—and I hope our audiences, too.”

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