The Way I See It - Kai Hsiung

I was born at London’s University College Hospital in 1964. At the time my parents were still in a flat above a greengrocer’s in central London they were renting when they met at the Slade art school in the 1950s. I went to Camden School for Girls, which is still going; still a girls’ comprehensive school.

I had a very happy, normal childhood. We were in this ground-floor flat in North London and knew all the neighbours. We didn’t have a car. My parents have never driven. My dad didn’t have a passport for years because he was Chinese; he’d come over before he needed one. 

We’d go to the Isle of Wight every year. We went across in a boat, so my siblings and I thought that was ‘abroad’. Then we got older and realised everyone else was going to Spain! Dad’s still in that same North London flat. It was £18 a month when we rented it in 1968 and moved in. I was four and it’s now still very cheap for what it is, as it’s a fixed rent. The landlord’s praying for my dad to die – he is 94 now, so…

My great-grandfather, Walter Lambert, was a female impersonator who dressed as a nurse – his stage name was Lydia Dreams.

My mum, Thelma Lambert, was a children’s book illustrator and writer. She threw herself into making things for us at home and doing quizzes and treasure hunts.

The household I grew up in was creative. My grandad was an artist. He met his wife, Hilda, at Camberwell Art College. And his father, so my great-grandfather, Walter Lambert, was a female impersonator who dressed as a nurse – his stage name was Lydia Dreams. He was a ventriloquist as well and one of my granddad’s earliest memories was lying under a table and operating a puppet who was called Lucky Nutty Jones.

He wrote on a piece of cloth in blood from the severed finger something along the lines of ‘having no education is like losing a limb…

Walter Lambert was also an artist who did an amazing portrait of all the music hall stars at the turn of the century, it was called Popularity. Both the puppet and the portrait are in the London Museum.

Above: Popularity by Hsiung’s great grandfather Walter Lambert, painted between 1901-1903 at London’s Waterloo Road, near The Old Vic.

On the Hsiung side – my Chinese granny’s family were teachers and there was a story about her father that he’d cut his finger off to protest the fact that because she was a girl she couldn't go to school. Apparently, he wrote on a piece of cloth in blood from the severed finger something along the lines of ‘having no education is like losing a limb...

I always thought that my dad made that story up to make me appreciate education. Kind of ‘you must go to school because your granddad did this’. Anyway, me and my aunties in America were sorting through stuff and found a picture of his shortened finger. So that was true. He has his daughter, my Grandma Dymia, dress up as a boy so she could go to school.

I come from a long line of people who’ve all done amazing things. I feel a bit rubbish that I've just been just doing advertising!

This was back in imperialist China, so she wasn’t allowed to have an education. My great granddad, motivated by his bright and precious only daughter, established the first modern Free School for Girls in the Jingxi Province in 1911. Dymia Hsiung went on to publish a novel called Flowering Exile – was the first Chinese woman to do so in the UK!

My Chinese granddad, Shih-I Hsiung, managed to teach himself English through cinema. He was putting films on in Shanghai. He also wrote a play, Lady Precious Stream, that was brought to the UK in the 1920s. That’s when he came over. Gradually, the rest of the family – there were six of them – joined. My dad finally came in 1949 with one of his sisters.

Above: Kai’s maternal ancestors, the TSAI’s. Her great grandfather's severed finger is visible on his left hand. The photo was taken around 1909 in Nanchang where they lived.

I come from a long line of people who’ve all done amazing things. I feel a bit rubbish that I've just been doing advertising!

My father was influenced by my grandfather’s love of cinema. So after art school, Dad managed to get work as a film editor for the National Coal Board, who produced wonderful documentaries. Every department would make an educational short film every month about electricity or coal or something. But in 1985, they closed the Coal Board. My dad didn’t know what to do. 

It was a simple childhood but very creative and fruitful.

He’d always been an amazing cook and it was just the start of the British getting into Chinese cookery. So he wrote a book for M&S (known as St Michael then). I think everyone had it. Madhur Jaffrey was doing the Indian stuff and my dad, Deh-Ta Hsiung, was doing the Chinese stuff.

He could have been a TV chef, but he did some screen tests and they went disastrously wrong. He did one test for the show Pebble Mill at One and literally set fire to the ceiling and the wok. It ended up on TV blips and bloopers show It’ll Be Alright on the Night. The broadcasters went with Ken Hom in the end. So his TV career never took off but he carried on writing. He’s written about 30 books. That was his second career, but he loved film and was an amazing editor.

He was one of the early members of BAFTA, I used to go with him about twice a week. I’ve only just cancelled his membership as it was too much stress for him trying to judge this year because he can’t remember anything.

Above: Deh-ta Hsiung, Kai's father was both a film editor and celebrated cookery writer.  

We didn’t have much financially but Mum would make things. She’d make our party clothes. It was a simple childhood but very creative and fruitful.

One of my earliest memories was on my fourth birthday and Dad had just got a gramophone, as it was called then. Mum had made the most amazing Magic Roundabout cake and put it on the turntable so it went round and round. But the gramophone was ruined. Dad was so angry. That’s the sort of detail my mum went into.

At school I wasn’t super excellent or very bad, I was just sort of average. I enjoyed it and got into the art foundation at Middlesex Poly, then I got into Brighton Art College and did a degree in fine art and printmaking. And then the Royal College of Art. So, I studied art for six years. I could have done medicine!

When I was young I hung out with my dad at editing suites in Soho. I have very early memories of going to Patisserie Valerie on Old Compton Street.

I gravitated towards printmaking because I liked being with people. I didn’t like this idea of painting on my own in an attic. The print room was really great; people doing different things and we’d talk and learn from each other. I always ended up organising the catalogue or the show or the parties. I was doing that as much as doing the art. 

Above: A Dolls House for Fiona, by Hsiung’s mother Thelma Lambert, a successful children's book author and illustrator. 

I had a talent and a fondness for organising things. Maybe it’s because I’m the eldest child. My brother is 12 years younger than me. I was looking after him a lot. That probably put me off having kids. No, he was lovely but, you know, it was a lot.

When I was young I hung out with my dad at editing suites in Soho. I have very early memories of going to Patisserie Valerie on Old Compton Street. It was a treat to go and visit dad. He’d be dragging me past all the big porn posters saying, “Don’t look!”. I sort of remember all that even though I was in a pushchair when I first went.

If I hadn’t gone into advertising I’d like to think I’d have done something useful. Wouldn’t it be amazing to do something like scientific research into cancer or something? Mind you, I wouldn’t have been able to be a doctor or surgeon because blood makes me feel a bit… hmmmm.

I had thought I’d maybe make a go of being an artist but at the RCA wasn’t very positive about my work.

I had no idea what I wanted to do when I left school. I did teach for a couple of years, which I enjoyed. I had hoped I’d maybe make a go of being an artist but at the RCA wasn’t very positive about my work. I was one of the few figurative artists, it was the start of the whole Young British Artist hype. So, the people they were favouring were doing abstract things with sand and metal etc.

Hsiung’s mother Thelma Lambert was endlessly creative. For her children’s birthdays she built a rotating cake celebrating TV show, The Magic Roundabout (above, left) and a puppet theatre recreating the marionette goatherd scene from The Sound of Music (above, right).

I did teaching for two years at Harrow College of Art and Sunderland College of Art, but they didn’t pay you over the summer holidays. So I took other jobs. I worked at Deadline magazine and Time Out for a while. At Deadline, they made me the business manager. I hadn’t got a clue. They threw me in at the deep end.

I had to make sure all the artists got their work in on time, which meant going around people’s houses and knocking on the door because they hadn’t sent it in. People like Jamie Hewlett of Gorillaz and Tank Girl fame.

Above: The Lambert side of the family included Roger Lambert, who launched the legendary Studio Lambert in Soho in 1955. It produced award-winning ads in the 60s and now boasts such hits as Race Across the World and The Traitors.

Then a friend told me Howard Guard’s company needed a receptionist. I had an interview and got the job and that’s where I started. Reception work, pre-mobile phones, meant you handled every single call coming through that switchboard. You knew who and where everyone was.

The first Cannes I went to as MD, they had to add the Titanium category for BMW because they didn’t know where to fit it.

I remember on my first day they said, “Oh, get Howard. He’s at the White House,” and I’m like, “What? He knows the US President?... Oh, it’s an edit house.” You had to figure things out. We only had ten showreels and you knew who had them. The receptionist was the beating heart of the company. Every crew member would come in, bring their invoices or portfolios. Then the director I was working with, Steve Lowe, and Ronnie West, the producer, said, “We’re going to move to RSA. We’d really like to take you as a PA,” so I went and met Jo Godman and that’s how I started.

From PA and worked my way up. The first few years I produced lots of ads. Then the branded content thing started in 2001 when I switched to MD. It was very much the buzzword. The BMW stuff came into the US office.

Brands don’t understand the value that a smaller independents can bring.

The first Cannes I went to as MD, they had to add the Titanium category for BMW because they didn’t know where to fit it. We all thought, ‘great, branded content, this is the future’.

I think branded content should be front and centre. If people aren’t watching ads on TV and you want to tell a bigger story to drive engagement, then longer branded ten-minute films are the way to go. They’re saying people are watching things for about eight to ten minutes, now. It used to be two to three.

But you need a client who’s brave enough to go on the full journey and not just see how many widgets they’re selling. Clients need to embrace the fact it’s about the whole brand. It’s not just about selling one particular item.

Above: While working at Deadline magazine, Hsiung had to chase up artists for their work, such as Jamie Hewlett, creator of Tank Girl.

Things are getting harder for small production companies competing with the Omnicom and Publicis groups. Brands don’t understand the value that a smaller independents can bring. If they are looking at widgets and numbers, they think it makes sense to do it in a bigger corporate way, but it just doesn’t. A client might dislike a director being motivated to make good work to put on their showreel, but if the work is good and everyone loves it, then everyone wins as it will sell. 

Look at the On Running work. A lot of is really beautiful. It’s creative and interesting. They’re succeeding with a smallish company but they’re very smart. They’ve got an in-house team but they go to production companies to boost the work.

I think agencies are going to have to do a lot of thinking; they’re all expanding to do more in-house production at the agency but the clients are sidestepping them and if they find the right production team to work with that’s a good option for them and more cost effective too. 

You’d never see a female creative unless it was campaign for sanitary towels.

When I started at RSA in January 1992 the business was so male dominated. You’d go into meetings and the PA or the producer would be the only females in the room. You’d never see a female creative unless it was campaign for sanitary towels.

Though in some ways equality has come along in leaps and bounds, still the majority of crew are male. If anything, it’s slightly regressed – especially in regard to the top jobs, which are still male dominated.

Above: Tony Scott directed this BMW branded content, Beat the Devil, through RSA’s US office. It starred Clive Owen, James Brown, Gary Oldman and a BMW Z4.

I suppose it’s hard in our business now to understand what the great jobs and opportunities are because AI is causing such massive change. And there’s a sort of dumbing down. It used to be so creative. I’m very fortunate to have been involved in the industry in the ’90s when amazing music videos and ads were coming out. 

There was such attention to detail and campaigns were given proper time and money. You just don’t see great ads like Guinness Surfer now. You got your experience by going on set. I think film crews and production were full of people who weren’t quite sure what they wanted to do, but they had a love of it and they could learn on set.

I am concerned that I’ve been institutionalised. I’ve been at RSA for 34 years.

In advertising, we shoot so rarely here in the UK nowadays. TV commercials are generally shot in Eastern Europe or Mexico or South Africa because it’s cheaper. So people can’t get that practical training. That’s going to kill the industry.

I am concerned that I’ve been institutionalised. I’ve been at RSA for 34 years. What’s next for me? I don’t know. I could possibly go back to teaching even or maybe something totally different. I am giving myself this period to handover to [new MD of RSA] Josie Juneau, and then I’ll sit down and try and work out what to do.

I was putting on a suncream and felt a lump. I thought, what’s that? Went to the doctor and boom…

I think there could be a new direction for RSA. I’ve been their MD for 23 years, and this is a chance for Josie to look at it again and see what she wants to do. It’s natural, to have if not a complete change of direction maybe a new perspective . Josie comes much more from agency side, which I didn’t.

Above: ON Running longform work The Cloudhorizon, was produced and created in-house.

The worst day of my life was 32 years ago when my mum died of bone marrow cancer. She was only 56. Luckily the three of us, my brother, sister and I were there with her when she died in a hospice in North London. My dad wasn’t there. It was awful; he’d gone home to pack his bag to spend the night with her and he missed her dying. I remember it too well even though it was back in 1994.

I was 52 when I got breast cancer. I’d had a mammogram and it didn’t show up. Then it was at Cannes; I was putting on a suncream and felt a lump. I thought, what’s that? Went to the doctor and boom… but I was very lucky in the sense that it hadn’t spread. I had surgery but I didn’t have to have chemo.

I didn’t cry the whole time I had cancer. You just get on with it. 

I want to tell people, ‘check yourself physically all the time’, because that is the only way I found it. I was very lucky but it gave me pause for thought.

The best day of my life was probably when they gave me the all clear. I didn’t cry the whole time I had cancer. You just get on with it. Finally, after six years they said you don’t need to come back for any more checks. I just burst into tears. I’d just been holding it in for that long.

It’s so hard to pick a favourite piece of work I’ve done. But I did really enjoy the marketing campaign we did around Prometheus. It was great working with co-producer Caspar Delaney. You felt you were doing something a bit different. It was really driven by Ridley, who said, “I can’t do a normal trailer for this film, it will give away too much. Everyone’s been waiting for what’s next.” It was groundbreaking and after that you saw it more and more, that type of viral marketing around a film.

Above: Eschewing a regular trailer, Ridley Scott wanted to create bespoke extra content to market the film Prometheus, heralding a new trend.

A Ridley Scott ad that I really enjoyed working on was the launch of Orange Mobile. Ridley wanted to try out a DP for Gladiator, and Jake suggested John Mathieson, who Ridley then took on to Gladiator.

Another highlight was the Life in Day series. For the first one, in 2010, YouTube came to Liza Marshall at Scott Free Films in London and said, “We’d like to celebrate five years of YouTube. Can you come up with something that is global?” We sat around a table in a group to discuss it, and I think Kevin MacDonald, the director, ultimately came up with the idea.

Kevin asked people to answer very specific questions like, “what’s important to you,” to ensure the resulting footage had a purpose. And the formats were so different to the 2020 one, not everyone had a smartphone, so we were being sent in little DVDs and all sorts of cameras. We wanted to give it a remote wider world feeling, so we just posted little cameras to people in Siberia, Brazil etc we had about 70,000 hours of film for that.

When we picked the date for the 2020 Life in a Day film, we had no idea that George Floyd’s murder was going to happen on that day.

The 2020 Covid edition was heartbreaking. Kevin had a team of about fifteen editors going through the 370,000 hours of footage that we received. So he’d give them all categories, to select all the stuff that was about love, for example. When we picked the date for the 2020 film, we had no idea that George Floyd’s murder was going to happen on that day. All those protests in Georgia hadn’t happened when they commissioned it in February.

Above: This moving crowdsourced documentary, produced by Ridley Scott and directed by Kevin Macdonald, is the sequel to the 2011 film Life in a Day, and comprises an array of video clips showing things happening in the world on one day: July 25, 2020.

Abbott Mead came to us, they’d seen Life in a Day 2010 and wanted something similar for Sainsbury’s for Christmas. They wanted Kevin to do it, I spoke to him and he said, “I will do it but they have to understand it’ll only work if I have final cut.” At that point, Sainsbury’s only wanted a ten-minute film. They went away and we thought it was never going to happen.

The best piece of career advice I was given was, ‘Keep your head down, only bother them (as in Ridley and Tony) when you really need them’.

Then they came back and said, “Yes, he can have final cut.” So we had six weeks before Christmas one year to get all the filming done secretly, then edit it to come out the year after. We had to keep it under wraps; you couldn’t put a normal public call out like we had done for Life in a Day. Ridley had done a BBC TV announcement to get footage for that. We had to be stealthy, we went to turkey farms and so on and asked them to make little films.

Those films are a testament to the power of editing. We were talking about trying to do a documentary at one point on how many great film editors are women and people don’t realise it. Martin Scorsese’s Thelma Schoonmaker for example.

Above: Christmas In a Day, inspired by Life In A Day and sponsored by Sainsbury’s, is a poignant record of who we were at Christmas 2012. It was directed by Kevin Macdonald and produced by Debbie Garvey.

Ridley’s current editor is a woman, Claire Simpson, he’s worked with for many years. I think it could be that editing means they find a way of balancing kids, life, whatever, rather than being on set all the time.

The best piece of career advice I’ve been given was when I first became MD at RSA, a guy called Terry Needham, who was Ridley’s first AD, said to me, “Keep your head down, only bother them (as in Ridley and Tony) when you really need them.”

Also a piece of advice from my Mum was that you can spoil children with things, but you cannot spoil them with love. We definitely need a bit more love and care for the younger people in the world right now.

I think if you only socialise with people from advertising, you’d be in a terrible place. It’s a bit La La Land.

I have been a bit of a workaholic. I have been reflecting on my career of late, and my husband Colin said he could remember certain holidays we’d had largely because of some drama that happened at work that punctuated it. Isn’t that awful?

We went to the most amazing island with a beautiful beach with Nelly, my stepdaughter, and her friend. Johnny Hardstaff was having a nightmare with a producer and he rang me and was wanting me to try and fire her mid shoot. Another time on holiday, Chris Cunningham was going to walk off a job (for a valid reason) and I spent the whole time on the phone convincing him not to. I remember more about where I was having to deal with crises rather than the actual holidays. Mind you, the job was the only way I could afford to go on those holidays.

Above: Big, for Barclays, directed by Tony Scott, is among Hsiung's favourite campaigns she's worked on. 

I’ve kept in touch with a lot of my friends who are not in the business – teachers, nurses, charity workers. Just different types of work that keep you grounded. I think if you only socialise with people from advertising, you’d be in a terrible place. It’s a bit La La Land.

If I have a hobby I guess it’s cooking. Cooking for my dad.

I had no idea [the British Arrows Fellowship] was coming and unfortunately, as my husband recently reminded me, I got a bit drunk.

What makes me angry? Oh, people lying, people being unfair, people being selfish. Probably all the normal things, I can’t bear it when you realise someone’s been lying and that it happened at work and you just want to say, ‘why did you do that?’.

I think the best day of my career was getting that British Arrows Fellowship, I was truly humbled and surprised. They’d all kept it secret. I had no idea it was coming and unfortunately, as my husband recently reminded me, I got a bit drunk. I was sitting at the table and when Ridley’s face came up on the screen, I thought, oh, he’s getting an award…