‘Expats’ Production Designer Yong Ok Lee Explains How She Recreated Hong Kong in Los Angeles

The crux of Yong Ok Lee’s production design for Lulu Wang’s Expats was initially supposed to consist of a handful of sets built in Hong Kong, including apartments for Nicole Kidman’s Margaret and Sarayu Blue’s Hillary. Then COVID hit. And production had to move to L.A., meaning Lee and her team had to rebuild and recreate their sets and build new ones in record time without their original materials.

Listening to Lee explain the process, it’s clear that creating the multiple worlds of Expats amid the chaos of a pandemic was a Herculean task, but the execution was seamless. The production design mirrors the series’ exploration of wealth, class, grief, and identity with rich sets that are layered and packed with textures and details that further our understanding of the characters and their struggles.

In an interview with Awards Daily, Lee discusses reteaming with Wang for Expats, designing living spaces for Kidman and Blue’s complex, multi-cultural characters, recreating Hong Kong night markets in Los Angeles, and maintaining continuity after having to relocate mid-production. 

Read our full interview with Expats production designer Yong Ok Lee below:

Awards Daily: First of all, I’m so excited to talk to you. I saw the world premiere of Expats at TIFF in September, and I remember thinking, ‘I hope I get to talk to the production designer.’ So, I’m thrilled that you’re here. Thank you so much.  

I have to ask about your relationship with Lulu Wang because you’ve worked together, not just on her films, but also on her commercials and shorts. Tell me about coming back together and about your early conversations about Expats.

Yong Ok Lee: Thank you! I’ve had a long relationship with Lulu and worked with her on her film, The Farewell. So, after The Farewell, she talked about her next project, and there were several, but one of them was actually Expats.

She mentioned that she met with Nicole Kidman, and then Nicole asked her to do her show Expats. She talked about Expats a very long time ago, discussing how she wanted to work with cinematographer Anna Franquesa-Solano and me. So, she told us about what kind of project it was. 

Awards Daily: One of my favorite things about the production design in Expats is the homes and how you designed each character’s house to reflect their story. The show explores so many characters, lifestyles, and levels of wealth. How did you create all those different worlds within the living spaces that we see?

Yong Ok Lee: We had apartments for Margaret and Hillary, Margaret’s secret studio, Mercy’s apartment, and the Hong Kong locals’ apartment, which is shown only in episode five.

We built Margaret’s luxury apartment (Manors on the peak) in L.A., but Hilary’s apartment in Hong Kong. They were stage building sets. For Margaret’s studio (her secret apartment) was a location where we found an empty apartment building and we tore down walls and made it studio apartment with a narrow hallway.

Both Margaret and Hilary’s apartments ( Manors on the Peak) were luxury apartments in Hong Kong that reflected Hong Kong’s expat life. When I went location scouting in Hong Kong, I saw many expat apartments. They are all different. Some people are from China, some are from New York, and some are from Europe. They’re different.

But their lifestyle is all kinds of luxury, and every apartment has an immigrant workers’ room. So, Puri and Essie’s room should be attached to their apartment, which usually connects to the laundry room and kitchen. So, the laundry room, kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom are their own world inside the employer’s luxury apartment.

So that’s what contrasts between Puri and Essie and Margaret and Hillary. I researched apartments in Hong Kong; it’s an Asian apartment, unlike an American condominium, and their architectural style is different, the hardware and everything. So, the structure we followed was an Asian apartment, but the interior design was what they could change; I wanted to add a little bit of New York-style for Margaret, maybe mid-century modern and classic material she would bring from her home. On the other hand, Hilary’s apartment has a more California sleek-style with luxurious marble and brass materials on it.

We built Mercy’s apartment on location. Her apartment is supposed to be one unit but divided into three or four different units. Because Hong Kong has no space to live in. Every apartment is tiny, and her apartment is one of those low-income apartments. Her layout is unique because she has no room door. Her room is through the bathroom door, and it makes sense because it’s one apartment that’s been split into four units. So that’s how we built Mercy’s apartment. 

I also wanted to make it a little bit minimalist because she has a hipster vibe. She’s from Brooklyn, New York, and wants to make her space a little cozier. Even though she doesn’t have money, she’s stylish, so I wanted to add that. Also, color-wise, I want to have some pops of color, like blue. I wanted to add a little bit of romanticism on the side. But I also wanted things to have some scratches and imperfections, like her broken tiles. The scratches on the wall in her room reflect her pain. That’s my approach to building her world.

Awards Daily: What else did you do to reflect on the individual characters in the production design? What other details, colors, and things did you add to bring their personality to these spaces? 

Yong Ok Lee: For Hillary’s apartment, for example, because Hillary has lots of social masks—She never shows the real her—I wanted to make her space a bit camouflaged. When we built her apartment, she had lived in Hong Kong longer than Margaret, so she had more changes to her apartment. So we renovated her apartment and added color—a color kind of like her skin tone. We did a lot of camera tests with her skin tone and then her costumes. Then, we chose those colors that you usually do not see in Asian apartments.

Usually, in Asian apartments, the primary color is white, which is very uniform. And then she changed her color entirely with her stuff. So, I designed it that way so she could paint her entire apartment in her color and renovate her place the way she wants to live.

Plus, her apartment always looks different from David’s. Her apartment is entirely her style. So, when we see their broken relationship, we see David has no place to stay. There’s nothing for David in her apartment, even though they live together. That was intentional in what we designed.

I wanted to give Margaret’s apartment an artsy tone because, even though she’s a housewife in Hong Kong, she’s also a landscape architect. So, I wanted to show her an artsy side. I used lots of natural materials, like wood; the color is more muted, but it’s not entirely white. I slightly changed it, adding lots of color and different tones. It almost looks white because I wanted it to still feel like an Asian apartment. But I brought a little color and softness to make it more appealing to her. Also, the place is more practical because of the kids. So, her place has lots of stuff going on, and she also uses lots of natural materials. I wanted to use two different materials. One is standard wooden material like oak wood for the floor and some furniture pieces. However, for the doors and some accents, I used very fragile wooden materials. It’s almost dry, almost like a dry wooden tear. So, it shows how pain spreads from deep inside. I wanted a little bit of contrast between that material. 

Awards Daily: I read that you had to recreate the Hong Kong night markets in L.A. What exactly went into that?

Yong Ok Lee: Yes, the night market was initially shot in Hong Kong. We dressed everything in Hong Kong and then shot there, and then, unfortunately, because of COVID, we had to shoot in L.A. again. 

For the stage build in L.A., we had to build the HK night market stalls and the ground. It was very difficult because nobody knew how to make a Hong Kong street vendor, the materials, metals, or structure. Nobody in L.A. knew what a Hong Kong street vendor looked like. I had to buy a book about street vendors from Hong Kong. Then, my art director translated it because she reads Chinese. And then, she taught the set designer and the construction people how it should look. So, we built that. 

So, we ended up building 10 stalls in L.A. and matching the dressing and ground for the night market in Hong Kong. In order to match the continuity, we had to ship the main dressing props from Hong Kong and redress some of the stalls. It was very challenging. 

Awards Daily: Tell me a little about the overall picture, the scope of Expats, and what that looked like for you.

Yong Ok Lee: Originally, we didn’t plan to build much. We mostly thought we were going to build two main locations, which are apartments, for Margaret and Hillary. And then we were probably going to shoot the protest scene and then occupy somewhere else. That was the original plan.

But the pandemic hit, that was hard, and we could not control it. So, a lot of what we planned to shoot in Hong Kong, we couldn’t finish in Hong Kong. So we came back to L.A., and then we rebuilt everything. Even until the last minute, I didn’t know I had to build so many sets in L.A.

When I was in Hong Kong, we were planning to build Hillary’s apartment first. And for budget reasons, we wanted to reuse parts of Hillary’s apartment for Margaret’s apartment. Because they are technically the same apartment unit. So, I designed the apartment in a way where it would be easy to flip it into another set. I designed Hilary’s apartment first, used all the natural materials, marble, and everything. We designed and customized everything because it’s a lot cheaper than buying. We built Margaret’s apartment in L.A.

And then there’s no way I can buy nice high-end furniture in Hong Kong. So we ended up building everything, and then all the materials came from China, like all the marble and natural materials.

Of course, we ended up building everything in L.A. And there was no way I could get the same material from China to L.A., So we recreated everything in L.A. with construction and team. It had to be the same material and look the same. Plus, the hallway and elevator we had to build again in L.A. and it had to look exactly like what we built in Hong Kong.

So, we have to build entirely again in L.A. for those sets. The rest, like a noodle shop, was built in L.A., so we scouted in Hong Kong for an exterior noodle shop. Then we built the interior of the noodle shop in L.A. And then the local shop where Margaret bought some household stuff for her studio, which was also built in L.A. And the walkway, when Margaret comes to her secret studio, that one was a building in L.A., built in combination with special visual effects.

The Chinese morgue, is also a building set in L.A. I built three different rooms for the morgue. And then there was the orphanage bathroom, where Hillary washed her hands. That was also a set in L.A. We built a night market. We shot the the occupy scene in L.A. on a stage backlot. So we built an entire tent and everything, all the graphics, with special VFX. 

Awards Daily: Wow. Before I let you go, is there anything else I need to ask you about that you want to mention? 

Yong Ok Lee: It’s extremely difficult to shoot in Hong Kong. It’s more expensive than L.A., so that wasn’t easy. 

The really funny thing was the picnic for the immigrant workers because that was huge. We had to dress the entire three blocks. Because of the pandemic, everyone wore masks, so we couldn’t even use the actual event, this set was hard for every department, especially. We had to add rain as well. I ended up using more than 300 umbrellas and my team showed me every umbrella by color, pattern and style. It was so much fun.

Every Sunday when I was in Hong Kong, I went out and researched how the immigrant workers held their picnics. And everyone, Filipinos, Indonesians had their own style and culture reflected in their picnics. I had a lot of fun researching and seeing their worlds.

Expats is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.