How Hong Kong embalmer’s graphic artist training helps him beautify bodies

Pasu Ng Kwai-lun, 36, is a soft-spoken young man. Fashionably dressed, he fixes his funky glasses as he speaks passionately about his craft – preserving dead bodies.

Ng attended the Hong Kong Art School and Polytechnic University design school, and he started out as a freelance graphic designer before his family, questioning the industry’s stability, lured him into the family embalming business.

Only half convinced of the wisdom in such a drastic career change, Ng became a funeral-home apprentice to appease his parents. Today, he is in charge of the dissecting room at the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s (CUHK) medical school.

Death has always been a taboo in Chinese culture, but Ng says working around death isn’t as creepy as people would expect. “Being an embalmer and a make-up artist for the deceased was a relatively easy job,” he says. “You work a few hours a day, and you can do your own thing. Not to mention how good the money is.”

Finding the graphic design industry becoming ever more saturated, Ng began supporting himself solely through embalming in funeral homes.

But even though he gave up on his artistic job, he says he’s sure that it helped give him a head start in his current career. “I am an artist,” he says. “When you preserve bodies, you have to understand aesthetics to a certain degree, because you are trying to make bodies beautiful again.”