An Interview with Composer Wong Kin Wai

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Breaking into the film music business in China and Hong Kong isn’t easy. The A-list of Chinese film composers is a short and exclusive one that gets most of the high-profile assignments, with the rest often going to seasoned foreign composers. And yet in just a few years, Wong Kin Wai has managed to go from composing TV jingles to creating his own company, Fun Track Music ltd, and scoring one the biggest Chinese films of the 2016 summer: Benny Chan’s Call of Heroes. No wonder, he’s a versatile and ambitious new musical voice, one that will most probably be heard more and more in the coming years in the fast-expanding Chinese film industry.

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An Interview with Composer Chan Kwong Wing

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In the twenty-two years since the beginning of his film music career, Chan Kwong Wing (also known as Comfort Chan) has scored more than seventy films and won three Hong Kong Film Awards, not to mention fourteen additional nominations. A true mainstay of the Hong Kong film industry, he’s also been shepherding aspiring and fledgling composers through his music studio Click Music Ltd, as well as being the record producer of Ekin Cheng, Pakho Chau and Fiona Fung, to name but a few. Simply put, if you love Hong Kong and Chinese cinema, whether or not you know his name, you know his music.

Where to begin when sampling the superb creativity and versatility of one of the most prolific and talented composers in film music? The iconic, mournful elegy to Anthony Wong’s character in Infernal Affairs? The thumping, single-minded call to duty and danger of Infernal Affairs 2? The insidious whirls that accompany Andy Lau’s psychological downfall in Infernal Affairs 3? For indeed, the Infernal Affairs trilogycould be considered Chan Kwong Wing’s masterpiece. Equally iconic is “Store The Sun“, the brutal yet ethereal piece that accompanies Donnie Yen and Wu Jing’s duel to the death in SPL, or the edgy electro and middle-eastern tones of the Flashpoint soundtrack. Some of his best work also includes Confession of Pain with its quietly heart-wrenching piano theme, the irrepressible bombast of Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen, the tragic sprawl of A Man Called Hero, the tense, anguished strings of Overheard, the grand melodrama of its sequel, or another one of his masterworks, the quirky and brooding Wu Xia (co-composed with Peter Kam and Chatchai Pongrapaphan). And that’s only scratching the surface.