Johnny Lau

Johnny Lau
Nationality	Singaporean
Notable works	"Mr. Kiasu" series

Johnny Lau is a cartoonist and CEO of Vasunas, a Singaporean animation technology company. Lau 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". Lau 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.^{[citation needed]}

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.

Lau got involved 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-designed the program and signed on for three years to start a program that invites youth under the age of 29 years old to come to Singapore, typically for a period of two weeks to partake in a workshop/competition. The two-week program includes usually a half dozen 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.

Apart from the youth program, Lau recently ran another program with ASEF, 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. Lau 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

It was also commonly held that Lau had been portraying a certain Strategy Manager in his work with Mr Kiasu, an inspiration that even the cartoonist could not fully articulate in his works.^{[citation needed]}

Over the years, Lau has established an 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.^{[citation needed]}

External links

• Johnny Lau at the Internet Movie Database
• [1]
• [2]
• [3]
• [4]
• [5] - The origin of Mr. Kiasu

Persondata
Name	Lau, Johnny
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