In early 2021, when Hong Kong-based Swiss designer Julie Progin gave JJ Acuna one of her archival pigment prints — the first in her lucky building series reimagining familiar Hong Kong architecture through symbolism — she could not have guessed how much “Hope Well” would come to mean to him.
The limited edition print shows the distinctive curved form of Hopewell Centre rising through a mass of mandarin oranges growing in a decorative ceramic pot. Rendered in vivid orange and red on a bright yellow background, it encapsulates celebration and the traditional symbols of wealth, prosperity and good fortune that typically mark the lunar new year, and integrates architectural and cultural references with a playful, modern twist.
“I have always enjoyed the motifs and meaning running through the ceramic works Julie and her partner Jesse create at their studio Latitude 22N,” says Acuna. “But this print also has a clearer meaning for me, and that is why I ultimately selected it as my favourite Hong Kong object.”
As an architectural concept and interior designer, Acuna is surrounded and tempted by beautiful things every day. On his walls, both at home and in his Hong Kong and Manila studios, he hangs what he describes as psychic self-portraits. “I am particularly drawn to objects that connect me to stories,” he says, pointing to an eclectic collection of vintage and contemporary objects: art from the Philippines and Hong Kong, pieces found on travels that have caught his eye and imagination over the years.
His choice of the print comes in part from what it meant to make a life somewhere that was not originally his. To move to a new country is to learn new ways, and to understand a city through its objects and rituals and rhythms, especially for someone who has made Hong Kong their home, he reflects, art in particular becomes a way of identifying and recognising yourself.
An unmistakable building
The undefinable quality of significant objects was described by 20th-century French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. In The Poetics of Space, he writes that in living with our objects, they shape us. The print that arrived as a gift during one of Hong Kong’s most difficult periods has done just this for Acuna, and become not just something he looks at and appreciates for its striking aesthetic and graphic qualities, but one that shows him where he is. Above all, it is evidence of how his world has changed, yet remains constant.
When Acuna arrived in Hong Kong in 2005, he was in his 20s, with architecture degrees from Cornell and Columbia, and an internship with Ronald Lu and Partners. He lived in a flat on Queens Road East, and his office was in Wu Chung House, next to the Hopewell Centre. Developed by tycoon Gordon Wu and completed in 1980, this landmark tower briefly held the title of Hong Kong’s tallest building, and it was the city’s first circular skyscraper. Its cylindrical form became an emblem of its time.
For Progin, the building has a personal connection. Hopewell Centre was completed the year she was born, and for a time she could see it from her balcony. She has fond memories of the revolving restaurant at the top, and is drawn to the way the building connects two different worlds: you can enter from the busy street level, but also from the hillside, so it is a bridge between town and country that echoes the print’s own logic of bringing unlike things together.
“It’s not my favourite architecture, but it is stubbornly and unapologetically Hong Kong,” Acuna laughs.
Layers of meaning
After a decade working for large firms on mixed-use towers in China and commercial developments, Acuna wanted to work directly with clients on projects with a story, where every element needs “a compelling reason to exist.”
In 2015, he opened Acuna Acuna / Bespoke Studio in Lee Garden in Causeway Bay, and the studio thrived almost immediately, delivering hospitality, residential, and lifestyle interior projects. The Elephant Grounds café on Star Street, one of his early jobs, won a Hong Kong Design Award in its opening year, followed by Tate Dining Room with chef Vicky Lau. Ventures across Asia followed as he built a reputation for his relaxed approach to luxury: refined, detailed, and always with a strong, thoughtful narrative.
But then Covid struck and projects were put on hold. Hospitality paused and the pace of life and work slowed, forcing a reckoning with what the studio was actually for. It was then, in early 2021, that the print arrived unexpectedly. “The first thing I noticed was the colour,” says Acuna. “It was like a blast of vitamin C, or joy.” It gave him an irrepressible optimism and innate faith in the future.
Acuna remembers being struck by Progin’s originality and flair, taking a building that most people would not think to celebrate and finding the meaning that ran through it. Julie had already sketched other buildings when she began the series, but Hopewell came first because the name felt auspicious. That and the circular form of the tower mattered, since she wanted to send good energy.
This depth of reference is how she works: she has been documenting Hong Kong’s patterns, colours and details through photographs and sketches since she was a child, preoccupied with the relationship between nature and the built environment and what she sees as a collaboration between the two in Hong Kong. Above all, Julie is drawn to the history of pattern — how motifs migrate, evolve and collide — and it is from this materiality that her images emerge.
The proportions of solid and void, the graphic relationship between the fundamental geometric shape of the tower and the organic abundance of the fruit, and — intriguingly — how the contemporary and the traditional intersect immediately made Acuna think of his own approach to work. He too bridges the gap between classic and modern, and begins every project with a story.
“That’s what we do. Everything needs to be part of a story that the client and the end user can inhabit and expand,” he says. Acuna believes the best spaces continue to communicate a fresh facet as you become aware of different qualities in colour, shape, and meaning the longer you live with them. The print works in exactly this way. “You know what it is immediately as you recognise the references. But slowly, over time, it reveals something new.”
By 2023, Acuna had begun looking for a new studio. “I asked myself what I wanted it to become over the next decade and realised that I needed to be somewhere with deeper roots, and that inevitably meant I should go where there are legacy businesses.”
He found a high floor in a 1980s building with natural light, high ceilings and, unusually for Wan Chai, no towers blocking the view. Across the road is a triangular courtyard with a tree in the middle, a petrol station and trams running past. It feels, he says, like a little town square on a smaller and more manageable scale.
“There’s a tea shop next door that’s been here forever,” he enthuses. “There’s a stationery shop from the 1980s, a shop selling sweaters, one that sells pets downstairs, and a school across the road. As I’m here for the long haul, to feel settled, I want to be in a neighbourhood with energy.” He even brought in a feng shui master who approved the distant mountain view. When the print was rehung on the new studio wall, Acuna was conscious that Hopewell Centre is five minutes away, and that he had started in Wan Chai, “and come back full circle.”
Making a new home
Born in Manila, raised in Texas and educated in New York, Acuna has been in Hong Kong for 20 years now, longer than he has lived anywhere else. Since he received the print in early 2021, he has moved his practice and decided what he wants from his profession. And when it comes to art, he has a reputation for integrating artists into almost every project his studio undertakes as narrative collaborators rather than decorative afterthoughts.
For the Elephant Grounds Coffee flagship in Star Street, Acuna worked with Tim Wong of Quest Terrarium to create a lush moss garden, and with graphic painter Katol on the visual identity for Coffeelin. For Bloomberg’s office in Manila, he commissioned a large wall panel from Filipina weaver Rita Nazareno in sea grass, cane, rattan, and leather arranged in a grid referencing data points while remaining unmistakably handcrafted. “It achieves what ‘Hope Well’ does, and instinctively holds multiple references at once,” he explains. “You know what it is. You feel it before you have to think about it.”
This year is the 10th anniversary of Acuna’s studio, and now that he is back in a neighbourhood that expresses the ethos of his current practice, he is more interested than ever in projects that have genuine intention behind them. “Hope Well” has become an emblem; a marker of how his relationship with Hong Kong has flourished.
“Hong Kong people believe that you get back the energy you give out,” he says. “Contacts are shared more freely here and opportunities are passed along.” The print that arrived during that difficult winter was an act of generosity in the purest sense. It was actually the first time Progin had ever shown her drawings to anyone, and the first time Latitude 22N had sent any hand-made wishes for the lunar new year, which felt important to them, says Progin, “given it was at a time when we could all only connect virtually.” There was no agenda, just the thoughtfulness that happens within a generous creative community.
When he looks at it now, Acuna sees the building that was there when he arrived in 2005 and, following a recent renovation, is likely to be there decades from now. It is a reminder of what drew him to Hong Kong in the first place, how he chose to live here, and why he cherishes it.