Adriel Chan and Julius Brian Siswojo want you to know skateboarding was never just about the tricks

Chan, who has carefully kept his private life private—he appears on Bloomberg twice a year and considers that quite enough—had not previously sat for a personal interview with Tatler. And until recently, skating was something he kept quiet. “I used to keep my passion for skateboarding very private,” he admits. “I have a public face and I have my private side, which I don’t share with anyone.” The two personas, he says, were oil and water. It was only when he began posting clips of his skating on Instagram that he decided to own his love for skating—not to publicise it, simply to stop hiding it.

But Siswojo didn’t know about Chan’s public side until a chance meeting with staff at Hang Lung tipped him off. “I texted him immediately that day,” he recalls, still amused. “‘AD, you’re the [expletive] owner of Hang Lung.’ He’s so humble.” That humility was what appealed in a business partner; he had turned away other would-be investors—people with money but no understanding of skate culture. “People think it’s easy,” Siswojo says. “But we’re building this for the community.”

Community is a word that comes up often when these two talk, but never cheaply. Siswojo tells a story about skating with both A Keung, a kid from Sha Tin who slept on the floor in a one-room flat while his grandmother took the bottom bunk and his brother the top, and Miguel Rosales, who was widely considered the best skater in Hong Kong and lived in a Mid-Levels flat with a view that went on forever. “When we skate, [we’re] all the same,” Siswojo says. “There was no such thing as the Who’s Who. There is no such thing as colour either. If you’re good, you’re good; if you’re sh*t, you’re sh*t. We don’t care who you are.” 

Chan, who largely skates solo, feels similarly. “In skating, if you make a fool of yourself, people laugh at you,” he says. “It’s refreshing. You need people to humble you.” For someone who has spent a career navigating rooms full of people who say yes to everything, that friction is not just welcome, it is necessary. There’s also no hierarchy when it comes to finally nailing a trick you’ve been working on for weeks, he says. “It doesn’t matter how good you are—even if you’re the ‘best’ skateboarder in the world, there’s [always] another trick for you to learn,” he says. “Instead of doing [tricks] on a ledge, you want to do it on a rail; instead of doing it down two stairs, you want to do it up two stairs. Siswojo agrees: “No money can buy that feeling.”

The vision for 8FIVE2 extends past Hong Kong. Chan spent years in Shanghai and watched as skaters rapidly grew their skills—the kids there, he says, are already technically better than those in Hong Kong. But the culture and the unwritten code is still catching up; they want to impart lessons in etiquette—such as giving a local spot its due respect before you drop in, and not cutting the queue at a ledge—and this is where 8Five2 comes in. Siswojo and Chan plan to take what they have built here—the physical space, the sensibility, the sense of belonging—north; not to sell boards so much as to export a feeling. “The skate shop was always the hub of skate culture,” Chan says, “a place where skaters would go to hang out, to get news, to learn about other skaters. That idea of having a centre where everybody from the culture comes together was always the dream.” 

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