MANGAAKS Vol.1 – BIG TIME

Author’s bio:
Chi-tak Li began his career in the comics industry in 1982. After working for a corporate comics publisher in Hong Kong for a month, he decided to start his own venture as a freelancer. Following on from the release of The Wisely series, he self-published Tong Men Shao Nian, a prominent title which rocketed him to fame in 1987. He has since developed a distinctive art style, creating his own visual world with eerily experimental works that broke genre rules.

Li’s transmedia creations transcend the boundary of comics and expand into movies, experimental theatres, literature, pop music and sculptures. His idiosyncratic style has attracted the attention and commissions from local and international brands. Li is also well-known to the international comics scene. His comics has been published in places like Japan, Taiwan, Malaysia, Mainland China, France and Italy since the 90s.

In 2016, the Hong Kong Arts Centre had jointly curated Li’s solo exhibition with the Angoulême International Comics Festival in France as one of the Festival’s thematic exhibitions. His French comics The Beast, a collaborative project with the famous Belgian writer Jean Dufaux, was released at the same time. This solo exhibition had given birth to another international cooperation opportunity. Li was invited by the Louvre Museum to create a new comics Moon of the Moon. The French version was released in November 2019 in Europe and the Hong Kong Chinese version by Today Publications in March 2020. In 2021, he published romance comics Yum Sui, and Kafka to pay homage to Franz Kafka's literary classics.

Book description:
MANGAAKS is a short comics project curated by zbfghk. There are no restrictions on the subject matter and techniques of expression, and it only depends on the concept provided by comics artists. By combining and playing with the unique texture of physical prints, it brings readers a different reading experience.

In an irresistible world, relatives and friends are all in isolation.
In such a state, things have to be essential.
The so-called decluttering means the survival of the fittest and the unnecessary reduction.
Only those who really want to meet will meet in person, if it's worth to wait.
Then we will wait for that day to meet again.