Cover Story: Adaptive Vision

KL is a city in transformation. That is part of what makes living here so exciting. Every few months we have a new restaurant, a new skyscraper (hello, Merdeka 118), a new road to traverse in a (generally electric) car. Ours is not a city standing still, but one driven forward by citizens who imagine what our future can hold.

Gentrification aside, KL is also a city with deep history. We trace through routes trodden since childhood accompanying parents and grandparents, whether it’s driving to Kajang for satay or roadside stalls in Jalan Beringin for chilly cendol and rojak. Yet as globalisation inches forward across our economy and way of life, how do we merge our comforting past with our aspirational future?

Ee Soon Wei has one solution. As the CEO of A Place Where by APW Bangsar, he has tried and tested a marriage between what once was, with the constant evolution of where KL and her dwellers are heading, to much success. His backstory is familiar to many in this town. The third-generation heir to Art Printing Works Sdn Bhd, which was set up in 1952 in Lebuh Ampang before moving to its Jalan Riong location, he took over the helm of a family business in its sunset years and transformed it into a modern-day success story by shifting APW’s focus from an industry to a hub. All the while retaining the core element of storytelling as laid down by his grandparents.

I ask Soon Wei to finish this sentence:

APW is a place where “you can kick off your day with a strong coffee before your remote working team meets for lunch and a strategy meeting. Weekends, do your yoga here. Day drink our natural wines. Enjoy the spaces we made for families to hang out—congregate at the communal tables with orders from various eateries while your kids run and play.”

Soon Wei has clearly realised his community has been growing with him and their needs are evolving. He tells me APW is looking to build children’s playgrounds and quiet spaces for new mothers to breastfeed. This plethora of activated areas, coupled with event spaces, gives credence to their tagline that APW is a contemporary creative campus.

A PLACE WHERE WE SHOOT

During the shoot, our designated studio for the day is Bookmark, APW’s first designated event space, and it provides a cool break from the Malaysian sun beating down outside. All the areas in APW are identified by names associated with printing. Bookmark, Paper, and Ink for the events. Bindery for restaurants. Canvas for the retail area. Pulp coffee conjures up ideas of paper pulp. Proof pizza is a twist on proofreading or the proofing of bread. Grano? Grain. Be it of paper or of wheat. These signs don’t just direct us; they are a peek into Soon Wei’s talent for grasping the big picture and then filtering it for clarity through catchy phrases and tag lines his audience immediately gets.

On the first floor above Bookmark are the team offices. “My team is young and we people watch a lot. They fall in love with the space and think about how to make it better, even in details like the signages and landscaping,” muses Soon Wei.

In real life, Soon Wei is taller than I imagined and immediately likeable. His is a quiet charm. Deep conversations are peppered with genuine compliments and succinct sentences. The stylist for this shoot happens to be a regular tennis partner for Soon Wei too, which adds to the intimacy that abounds. While we tuck into sweet and sticky Malay kuih (whose box is emblazoned with the catchy tagline “Kuihvings Satisfied”), I ask our stylist about a tank of five goldfish swimming nearby.

The idea is to play on the word ‘vision’ itself and the first thing that comes to mind is an optical illusion, which then culminated in this spread inspired by the art of Salvador Dali and Andy Warhol. As for the fish, they add a sense of irreverence to the high fashion Soon Wei is dressed in.

Oxblood creepers and finger gloves, a navy sports jacket, and denim jeans from Gucci by Sabato Sarno are a perfect sartorial metaphor for Soon Wei himself. Classic, with well-designed contemporary details. Just like APW.

BEFORE THE PLACE WHERE

While Soon Wei is most immediately associated with APW, this isn’t his first foray into repurposing spaces once occupied by his family business, nor was it an immediate career move. Soon Wei returned to Malaysia in 2005 after gaining a Bachelor of Commerce in Management and Marketing from the University of Melbourne in Australia. His university days were peppered with afternoons at cafés and parks around the city, laying a foundation for his love of café culture and the community it sparks.

Over the next five years, he built up work experience in corporate offices before playing an active role in the family businesses, starting with a conservation project at The Royal Press in Melaka, which was a letter-press print company that his family established in 1958.

From 2010 to 2013, Soon Wei engaged in a conservation project to highlight the charm of this heritage print process. Through the aid of grants from Malaysian corporations including Yayasan Sime Darby Foundation and CIMB Foundation, he restructured The Royal Press into a living polyglot museum. The uniqueness of this heritage museum project even inspired a documentary with The Discovery Channel.

Letter-press printing was a globally dominant form of print from the mid-15th century until offset printing usurped its industrial position. A craft heritage beauty is embedded in letter-press printing. It requires the human hand mixed with intricately crafted machinery and artefacts to produce relief-like scripts which newspapers in particular widely used.

The central Jonker Street building that The Royal Press inhabited was not the only element preserved and repurposed via this conservation effort. All the factors that made the printing company up, from a range of printing machines such as an original Glockner-Mercedes dating back to 1956 and a Linotype Model 78 from 1968 to a collection of 150,000 letter-blocks were conserved for display. This unique letter-block library houses four languages: Roman alphabets, Chinese characters, Arabic, and Tamil script. It may be seen as a physical embodiment of the diversity of Malaysians themselves, a cultural mosaic that The Royal Press once proudly served.

Stimulated by the success of The Royal Press Museum, which has become a favourite on Melaka’s tourist trail, Soon Wei turned his attention back to his childhood home of KL in 2013.

TAKING THE REINS

Soon Wei’s work at The Royal Press followed by growing APW stitches together potentially gaping chasms between sunset and sunrise industries, a phenomenon that plagues generational businesses as technology advances and lifestyles quickly change. An advantageous feature of sunset businesses are often large flows of financial and physical assets.

Decline of business, as commercial printing factory Art Printing Works faced with the rise of digital printing and publishing, and the possible de-valuation of assets that follows impacts not only the families that own these businesses, but can disrupt local and national economies too. Soon Wei circumnavigated this potential for trouble by quickly seizing on a delightful existing feature, APW’s central location, and repurposing it. It seems a love for location, family, and the Malaysia he remembers has led APW to be an iconically unchanged landmark in the heart of KL.

“I’m a Bangsar boy through and through, from when Bangsar was non-commercial. Remember when the pasar malam was on the streets in Telawi?” Soon Wei’s memories of Bangsar from the ’80s and ’90s are enhanced by his memories of Art Printing Works itself. As we stand together in the heart of the building on a break from shooting the cover image of this issue, he regales the PRESTIGE team and I with stories of how he started working in the factory from the age of six or seven. He says working, but his tales of running through towering mazes of paper stacks conjure up images of a little boy being brought into the family fold through play and wonder from the start. Until today, he hears the whirr of machinery and smells freshly printed paper when he stands in this spot, he says, indicating the deep imprint this left on him.

Editor: Tengku Zai

Photographer: Xerxes Lee

Stylist: Mughni Che Din

Videography: Por Jia Jun, Stanley Loh

Writer: Zena Khan

Grooming: Asaki Yok

Photography assistant: Aizzuddin Afiq

Styling Assistant: Surya Ammari

This cover story first appeared in PRESTIGE Malaysia’s August 2024 issue. To read the full story, pick up a copy in store or subscribe on Magzter.