Adele Leung – Learning From Life
NAME: Adele Leung
AGE: 45 LOCATION: Hong Kong Fashion Stylist, Creative Director, Writer, Photographer, Founder and director of AdeleLeung.hk and The Simply Love Project I was born in the space-precious Pearl of the Orient, Hong Kong, a big melting pot of cultures and nationalities, into a family of three daughters. Being born female in a Chinese family without sons, I was encouraged from young to do what boys are meant to do--play competitive sports, be tough, be independent—so swimming training, hockey playing, and being sent to survival camps were introduced to me as a child, although none of them suited my very delicate stature and taste.
I very much just preferred to be in nature, and live the preciousness of a “pearl on the palm” (what daughters are called in the Chinese culture) and the beach is my favourite place to be, where my body naturally moves in joy, with a sun-kissed face and flying hair.
Culture was a very foreign concept to me while growing up, I did not feel culture defined me, and neither did blood family. I didn’t learn traditions and never made cultural celebrations important. Birthdays were the only celebration I did and it felt to be an equal celebration with everyone I cared about. The world as I knew it, was much bigger than the place I was born in, what colour my skin is, and what religion my family has chosen.
The only absolute way I learn is by knowing it in my body – if I haven’t felt it, I can’t remember it! So school has been a strange endeavour, although I did it well by temporal standards, it has been done by exerting the most unnatural force on my body, which I was too nice to speak out about when I was younger, but my body certainly did speak through being constantly ill.
Oh but it is now! Learning life and myself this way is a process of deep joy, one in which I am learning to come back to a deeper trust with my body each and every day.
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I have always felt art to be something natural like breathing, so I never studied it, but I wanted to understand my culture more, so instead of Art, I chose my major to be Chinese Studies in University. After graduation, I walked into a fashion boutique and got myself a sales person position and started from scratch, working and learning my way into fashion. Almost twenty years on in the fields of fashion retail and fashion publications, I work and live from feeling the impulses of the heart and honouring them.
This has brought me to experience being an assistant manager, fashion buyer, features editor, beauty editor, fashion editor, fashion and lifestyle stylist, creative director, image consultant, fashion lecturer, photographer, and I feel the future unfolding into modelling, hair and makeup.
I am inspired at the age of 45, to learn how to put eye-liner on, and for the first time love having makeup on my face. I am inspired by my body every day, that growing older it experiences being younger, and becoming more mature has nothing to do with age.
Adele writes for Universal Medicine Exposed as The Voice of The Orient Expresses
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