Kenny X Li is a freelance photographer in Hong Kong who spends his mornings swimming at the beach near his apartment and his afternoons shooting across the city. He has a three-year-old son whose willingness to play without rules became the editorial philosophy for a magazine. YeP YeP, launched in 2021 from Hong Kong, is an almost entirely wordless publication — experimental, playful, collaborative — that showcases the city's creative community at a moment when most of the world only associates Hong Kong with political crackdowns and protest footage.
The first issue commissioned nine Hong Kong-based creatives spanning photography, fashion, and graphic design, each tasked with visually exploring their relationship to the city under the theme of "Hong Kong identity." The results were deliberately surprising: a cover story featuring a gender-fluid bodybuilder named Law Siu Fung juxtaposed with the skinniest male model Li could find, challenging the city's rigid perspectives on masculinity and sexuality. A graphic design duo called Virtue Village created a series of fake advertisements mimicking Hong Kong's kitschy street signage with subversive twists. Other projects explored food, feminism, queer identity, and street photography — all without traditional advertising, all rooted in a city that rarely gets to represent itself on its own terms.
The second issue pushed the format further. Inspired by his son's easy willingness to play, Li wrote his editorial vision as a children's poem — and printed it backwards, requiring readers to use a mirrored page opposite to decode the text. It is, as Stack Magazines noted, a brilliantly over-the-top piece of production that leads from something sweet and childlike into dark, strange visual experimentation. Li cited the Parisian fashion publication Masses — also entirely image-driven — as a key influence, and the conviction that without the distraction of text, the viewer can focus on the visual.
Sold in galleries and coffee shops in Hong Kong and through stockists in London, New York, and Berlin, YeP YeP made a brief, vivid mark on the indie magazine landscape. Li's goal was simple and political in the quietest way: to tell the world that Hong Kong is not all doom and gloom, that its creative scene is as vibrant as ever, and that a city can speak for itself through images alone.
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