Visitors to Inglewood’s iconic Food Mart and Video (aka The Blue Store), are about to see a change to the 13 Street SE face in a big way.

Calgarian Paul Sun-Hyung Lee has been honoured by MADE | NOUS, with a brand new mural as part of a public art campaign across Canada to better support and represent Canada’s film and television talent.

Sun-Hyung Lee is best known for his roles as Appa on Kim’s Convenience (which garnered him four wins and five nominations for Canadian Comedy, ACTRA, and Canadian Screen Awards), as Uncle Iroh in Netflix’s adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender, and as Captain Carson Teva in Disney’s Star Wars series The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett.

Being immortalized on a Calgary mural for his work on the screen was surreal, he said.

“I mean, gosh, my life has been very surreal the last few years. The term public art, it’s really weird. Like never in a million years I ever thought that my ugly face would be adorned on anything other than maybe a wanted poster or something,” Sun-Hyung Lee said.

“It’s quite lovely, and it’s a wonderful gesture. It’s humbling, it’s gratifying, and so many different great emotions are just coursing through my brain and my heart—especially my hometown of Calgary, to be feted and honoured in that way.”

He said that no actor sets out to be publicly immortalized with something like a mural, and that really it’s about doing the work that hopefully people enjoy watching.

“I was contacted by my agents, and they said, ‘MADE | NOUS, they’ve got this campaign that they’ve got going on, and they think you’re a perfect fit for it.’ They said, ‘you know, this, this might be a little bit weird for you, but they want to put your face on a mural in a part of your hometown,'” he recalled.

“When they said it was in Calgary, my heart leapt, and I was like, ‘yes, absolutely. Are you sure they want me though?’ Like, I think I can name a few other people that I think would probably be better suited. But it’s just like, ‘Wow, they chose me.'”

Three Canadian icons were chosen as part of a national campaign

Sun-Hyung Lee, along with Priyanka in Toronto and Jean-Marc Vallée in Montreal, were the three chosen as part of the campaign to represent those Canadians leading culture at home and abroad.

“MADE is exactly about that. We spend a lot of time celebrating Canadian singers, athletes, everybody that is doing well and shining in this country, outside of this country. But sometimes we forget to do this about the people that we are watching on our screens, or the people behind the screens,” said Mathieu Chantelois, Executive Vice President of Marketing and Public Affairs from Canada Media Fund.

The Canada Media Fund is one of MADE | NOUS, alongside Telefilm Canada, Bell, CBC, Corus, eOne, Elevation Pictures, Apple, The Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television, MPA Canda, the Canadian Media Producers Association, Ontario Creates, Quebecor, and Club Illico.

“We want to tell people that there’s actually some really good, incredible local Canadian talents. We don’t want to tell people that they should watch [Canadian content] because it’s good for themselves, like broccoli. There’s nothing boring about what we see on screen. We don’t have to force people to do it. We just have to celebrate the folks that are in front of and behind the camera,” said Chantelois.

He said that it was important for him to ensure that Calgary was one of the locations that was selected as part of the mural campaign, because it reminds Canadians that film has been a part of Calgary’s economy and Canada’s economy for a long time.

“This is not new, right? Superman was shot in Calgary in 1978, but Fargo the TV series, The Last of Us, Heartland—these are iconic films and TV shows. People always seem to think about Toronto first, Montreal in French, but I’m like, let’s go in Calgary, because not only it’s a city that does a lot of absolutely cool things on screen, but also because this is where Paul is from, and for me, he’s absolutely iconic,” he said.

“He’s like 52 but he’s cooler than all the my teenage nephews that I know. His character of Appa, of course, on Kim’s Convenience is legendary, but also the fact that he is such a geek. He talks about Star Wars with so much love. The fact is, he talks to everyone that talks to him on the street. He takes the time to chat with them. He really cares about his craft.”

Changing the perception of what is possible for Asian-Canadian actors

Sun-Hyung Lee said that throughout his career, its been a struggle to be seen and to be taken seriously as an actor.

“Because my entire life, my entire career, has been almost about people underestimating what I can do, what my abilities are, and not writing me off before I get a chance to just show what I can do. If I can inspire one kid or one individual to just not give up and to keep going and to keep pursuing and have that determination and that stubbornness to just keep doing what you love to do, then I think job well done,” he said.

Sun-Hyung Lee said that growing up, there was a lack of Asian representation in film and a lack of a diaspora that had success stories that kids like him could draw on.

“So, it was like a strange new world for me to sort of step into that and feel like a bit of a pioneer on a frontier just going out into the wild and trying to figure it out. I think (if) I had something like this to just sort of look at and kind of go, this is an example of a success story or somebody who’s still working in the industry who inspires me, this is proof positive that it can happen.”

Inspiring the children of immigrant parents and Asian and BIPOC artists was something that was a win-win for Canadian culture, said Sun-Hyung Lee,

“My life is weird. I’m working on three different projects right now on the East Coast, West Coast, and I’m flying back and forth between here, between Toronto, Vancouver and Los Angeles, and I’m doing all these different things. I feel like there’s still so much that I want to do, that I’m capable of doing, and that I want to inspire others to do as well,” he said.

“It is one of these things where, as Canadians, we kind of have this default setting—and I’m guilty of this, the Asian-Canadian upbringing. It’s the one-two punch of being humble, being very quiet, and like not trying to pump your own tires too much. I think in that sense, self-promotion isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Letting others promote you and champion you isn’t a bad thing.”

Mural program is a low-cost, high-impact way of recognizing Canadian film and television

Chantelois said that the choice to create murals was the result of feedback from many other campaigns that MADE | NOUS has done.

“We did a lot of TV campaigns, in the past with folks like Simu Liu and big stars, and they work well. We put them in movie theatres as well, but the reality is that there’s a lot of folks that are not at the movie theatre. They don’t watch traditional TV. But they all walking on the street, and they’re all looking for a good TikTok or Instagram moment, and that’s what the mural is offering,” he said.

“So, sometimes you need to get where people are to actually reach out to them. For me, that was let’s try something different. Let’s try something unique. Let’s try something where all these murals will happen overnight around the country, and people can talk about them.”

Hopefully there would be a discussion about what it means to be Canadian, to be in film and television, and what that means for the economy, he said.

“People don’t see us as an industry. We are a fund. We are a commercial fund. We’re here to inject money into the economy to actually create jobs. Not any kind of job, but creative good jobs where people are actually using their mind and their heart to actually tell stories to the world,” Chantelois said.

“But at the end of the day, every time that the Canada Media Fund invests $1 in a production, it gives back $4 to the economy. The math is pretty simple and pretty extraordinary and sometimes we forget about this.”