Magic Bean Photologue 02: Heroes

Heroes (十三箭) tells a story about a growing up girl in the world of Wuxia. Gor Lee was raised under the lack of parental love. One night the village in where she lived was under attack. Since then, she has to stay alone to wander around the world and practice martial arts, coming across different people. Nonetheless, the world of Wuxia was slowly changing, and Lee had to face a dilemma – was she destined to take revenge or to defend the spirit of martial arts?

Author Profile - Li 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 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 break genre rules.

Black Mask, Assassins, Tien Yao Ji, Superbaby, Little Strawberry, and K are major works that he created in the early stages of his career. He has been creating without pause for many years. Selected publications from the past ten years include The Voyager, The Lover, and Folio, Little Circle, Vicious, and Solar Eclipse.

Li’s transmedia creations transcend the boundary of comics and have extended to movies, experimental theatre, literature, pop music and sculpture.

Li is also well known in the international comics scene. His comics have been published in places like Japan, Taiwan, Malaysia, Mainland China, France, and Italy since the 1990s.

In 2016, the Hong Kong Arts Centre 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 gave birth to another international cooperation opportunity. Li was invited by the Louvre Museum to create Moon of the Moon. In 2019, the French version was released in Europe, subsequently followed by publication in Chinese and Malaysia. The drawings of the book were exhibited in The Belgian Comic Strip Center.

In 2022, the Hong Kong Arts Centre awarded Honorary Fellowships to Li Chi-tak in recognition of his invaluable contributions to the arts in Hong Kong and the Asian region.