Johnny Lau

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section is written like an advertisement.
Please help rewrite this article from a neutral point of view.
Mark blatant advertising which would require a fundamental rewrite in order to become encyclopedic for speedy deletion, using {{db-spam}}. (December 2007)

Johnny Lau is a cartoonist and CEO of Vasunas, a Singaporean animation technology company. Johnny is the creator of Mr. Kiasu, a popular Singaporean cartoon character.

Johnny Lau created Mr Kiasu book and self-published the title in 1990 in Singapore. The first title is "Everything Also I Want." Johnny was involved in publishing the Mr Kiasu book series for a period of 10 years, from 1990 to 1999. During this time, he was also involved in publishing another 20 over comics titles, both in English and Chinese titles. Johnny is probably the only person in the region who writes and illustrates for comics stories in both the Chinese and English languages.

Subsequently, he started a company- Vasunas during the dotcom boom, raising money from venture capitalists, and got familiar with the financial community in both Singapore and the Asia region. He traveled widely and started branches and rep- offices for Vasunas in Japan, Taiwan and India with his partner Vishnuram.

Johnny got involve with Creative Youth Xchange (CYX) in 2005 when MICA (http://www.mica.gov.sg) invited him to run the program as the creative director. Johnny re-design the program and signed on for 3 years to start a program that invites youth under the age of 29 years old to come to Singapore, typically for a period of 2 weeks to part-take in a workshop/competition. The two week program includes usually a half dozen of mentors from all walks of life such as art, music, advertising, theatre, media and design. The first program was run together with partner Gallery Hotel. Check http://www.creativeyouthxchange.com/cyx05/ for more information. Second program was run together with Sheng Tai Toys. Check [http://www.creativeyouthxchange.com/cyx06/.

Apart from the youth program, Johnny recently ran another program with ASEF,(http://www.asef.org) bringing together 12 professionals in the comics field from 12 countries to unite in Singapore to create a comics book. Johnny serves as part of the selection panel to locate and invite the participants, together with the ASEF staff members. http://comix.asef.org/team.html

Johnny initiated a program with MICA that allows creative talents from all disciplines to come together under one brand- Rojak. Johnny established a company to manage the collective brand. Using fund from MICA, Johnny's role is to identify companies that are keen to create new product lines to come under the Rojak brand, and provide a brand development fund to create prototypes. Once the products have enough feedback from the market, the company will further invest or bring in investors to fund the production of the products. http://www.rojak-city.com

Over the years, Johnny has established a interest in the area of the Creative Industries. He has and will continue to focus his attention in helping both youth and practicians in the creative sectors to 'advance' and integrate with the business world. Johnny believes that only when the creativity element is part of the business community will it be truly embraced by the mass population.