Imaging Cantopop

In 1988, CRHK’s Channel 2 (better known as CR2), led by creative director Yu Tsang, launched ambitious image-making endeavours to package, promote, and market its music and stars. CR2’s early members include Eric Kot, Jan Lamb, and Wing Shya, who all contributed to crafting the graphic identities of emerging stars and music genres through the design of album covers to concert tickets.

Wing Shya designed this double-sided ticket for Beyond’s Continue the Revolution concert, co-organised by CR2. Trained in graphic design and fine art—and later known as Wong Kar Wai’s go-to photographer and co-founder of the studio Shya-la-la—Shya got his first break as a designer in CR2’s production unit, creating concert banners, posters, even fonts on award plaques. This ticket design fuses hand-drawn and typeset typographic elements with found images of a ‘hand-horn’—a common rock concert gesture. Shya employed a richly patterned image from the bottom to the back of the ticket. This collaged approach became Shya’s graphic signature. 

Shya also incorporated archival photographs and found images into the design of this ticket for Anthony Wong’s concert. The pairing of Wong’s face and an enlarged image of an ear pokes fun at the concert’s title (黃耀明借啲耳音樂會), which translates literally to ‘The Ear That Anthony Wong Borrowed’. In Cantonese slang, the phrase means ‘finding an excuse’ (to stage a concert). Shya’s graphic treatment was typical of the double-coded—and highly localised—nature of early-1990s postmodern graphic design.

CR2’s ventures beyond conventional radio programming included the release of a charity record album, Green and Free New Generation, in commemoration of Earth Day. Hong Kong bands including Tai Chi, Tat Ming Pair, and Beyond contributed songs in support of environmental protection. Jan Lamb designed the cover as an interwoven tapestry of images of flora and fauna, green textures, and landscapes, as an ode to environmental biodiversity.

CR2 later launched Hong Kong’s earliest ‘Canto-rap’ duo, Softhard, consisting of Jan Lamb (MC Hard) and Eric Kot (DJ Soft). Softhard is known for their wildly popular Saturday night programme, traffic reports, and game shows that featured edgy music and signature Cantonese banter.

Trained as designers, Lamb and Kot created album covers alongside writing and performing songs. Their all-rounded activities culminated in the debut album Murder on Broadcast Drive.

The duo collaborated with Shya, a former schoolmate, to design an album with a Cantonese hip-hop spirit. As a cheeky shout-out to rapper Marky Mark and his appearance on Calvin Klein’s underwear ad, the album featured a composite image of two shirtless male bodies—jeans pulled down and underwear exposed with Lamb’s and Kot’s heads. They also commissioned Michael Lau to create illustrations mimicking the street-side calligraphic inscriptions of Hong Kong graffiti artist Tsang Tsou Choi (aka King of Kowloon).

 

‘Don’t pretend or try to project anything.’ These were Chan’s instructions to Cheung as he photographed him for Salute, an album of cover songs by singers and songwriters Cheung admired. Seating Cheung on a swivel chair and setting the camera on auto-shoot, Chan turned the performer around while capturing him in a most natural, thoughtful repose. Chan’s approach met the limited budget requirement to produce the album in a way that presented Cheung with a sense of spontaneity and emotional depth.

Images of Cantopop stars could even change between an album and a concert. Roman Tam released more than fifty albums. For one of Tam’s final albums, 《羅文多面體》, which roughly translates as ‘The Many Faces of Roman’, art director-costume designer William Chang Suk Ping presented Tam through a series of close-ups of the singer in motion. The fragmented and dynamic composition, featuring photography by Wing Shya, was unlike previous staged shots of the veteran singer.

Chang created a different aesthetic for the concert poster, which features a man—supposedly Tam—with a pineapple for a head, dining in white suit, with the presence of women on both sides, one in burlesque lingerie and the other extending her chili-like tongue.

The use of a pineapple is a playful pun on one of the Chinese characters in the singer’s name—the ‘lo’ in Roman’s name (lo4 man4 羅文) and the ‘lo’ in ‘pineapple’ (bo1 lo4 菠蘿) are homophones. The poster’s off-kilter irreverence—and especially its lack of a headshot—was an anomaly in concert publicity. It expressed Tam’s versatility as a performer and hinted at the concert’s guest appearances by Cass Phang and Sandra Ng.

The rise of Cantopop was part of a mass media explosion in Hong Kong, and graphic designers were central to the image-making celebrity machine. But their work could also extend off the flat surfaces of marketing material to create new opportunities for fans to relate to the music—as well as new possibilities for pop stars to connect with the changing world around them.