Step into Jeffrey Lee’s 10,000 sq ft office-slash-warehouse-slash-personal museum in Kwai Chung, and the first problem is purely logistical: where do you look first?
The place has the bones of a warehouse – grey carpet, metal racks, long corridors – but it’s lit like a slightly feverish ballroom. The light hits glass, plastic and brass; it catches on badges, buttons and the glossy eyes of plush toys.
Jeffrey Lee’s collection of military uniforms. Photo: Jocelyn TamOne room is dedicated to military uniforms – a showroom of garment-bagged jackets, mannequins in red ceremonial dress and glass counters spread with patches and medals like jewellery. Another is home to sports memorabilia, ranging from signed football jerseys to team hats. One glass cabinet is stuffed with phones from across the decades: rotary dials, cordless handsets, chunky office sets. It’s one of Lee’s biggest themed collections, started 20 years ago. There’s no record of how many pieces there are in total; he does, however, have a system: every time a new item comes in, it is noted in writing.Several spaces are effectively annexes for stuffed toys. In a long glass-fronted display, small figurines lined up shoulder to shoulder range from cartoon characters to toy soldiers. Nearby is a landscape of teddy bears and pandas, piled like boulders. Mickey Mouse, Tigger, Winnie the Pooh and a family of Donald Ducks all make an appearance. A cinema, complete with vintage film posters, is temporarily home to the 80 or so oversized stuffed toys Lee won at the AIA Carnival at Central Harbourfront this year alone – proof, as if any were needed, that the collection is still expanding.
Oversized soft toys that Jeffrey Lee won while playing the ring toss game. Photo: Jocelyn TamLee, who is chairman of insurance broker firm SFI International, is a fanatic of the ring toss game. “When I used to live in the United States, I’d often take my kids to Las Vegas and Reno,” he recalls. At famed casino Circus Circus, “next to the casino, they’ve got circus acts and these game booths. They set it up that way – so the adults can go gamble and the kids can play”. The children would play a couple of rounds with the US$20 their father had given them and win prizes. Lee, meanwhile, kept playing. “I’d be waiting for them and I’d spend my own US$20 there – bam, bam, bam.” Then the inevitable escalation: “They’d go, ‘Daddy, Daddy, do it with me,’ and I’d be at it for a full three hours.” The outcome is familiar to anyone who has ever tried to win a carnivalesque prize through repetition and stubbornness. “The whole car would be packed with these plush toys and we’d head home.”
More ring toss prizes at Jeffrey Lee’s office-slash-warehouse-slash-personal museum. Photo: Jocelyn Tam