The Man Behind the Mask

Performance artist Frog King has entertained people around the world for more than 40 years. But who is Kwok Mang-ho, the eccentric Hongkonger who brought this character to life?

- Oliver Giles

One night when Kwok Mang-ho was five years old—around the time his father was dying from tuberculosis—he set himself a reckless challenge. “I was on the street somewhere in the Times Square area, near Happy Valley,” he recalls. “Us children used to play with soda drink bottle caps. But that night I had a firecracker. I was thinking, ‘If I don’t throw it, what will happen?’ I felt a huge sound, a huge explosion. I didn’t feel pain. I just felt all my fingers bleeding. I was sent to hospital.”

Kwok, now better known as his artist alter ego Frog King, can’t quite explain why he didn’t let go of the lit firecracker. Nor can he remember why, a year or so later, he ran away from his mother on a day trip to the island of Cheung Chau, jumped into a sampan with some friendly fishermen, then, once they were out of the shallows, flung himself overboard. “I didn’t really know how to swim; I was drinking lots of seawater” he says. Luckily, the tide was in his favour—the waves tossed the six-year-old Kwok retching and exhausted on to the shore. “I wanted a challenge,” he says, almost laughing at the memory. “I wanted to do something where I didn’t know the result. I was very brave and enthusiastic to just do it, right?”

Kwok Mang-ho and his alter ego Frog King