Imaging Cantopop

Alan Chan’s attempt to reflect the spirit of the epic documentary The Silk Road extended beyond the soundtrack album’s sleeve design. Within the three-panel gatefold sleeve that folds out to reveal a longer dessert scene is a set of six collectible postcards, shot with an earthy tone and minimal composition, depicting key sites and everyday scenes along the Silk Road.

Just a few years after Chinese Mainland opened to visitors, Chan commissioned travel photographer Jacky Yip to capture the vast and diverse cultures and topography along the ancient trade route, including majestic Maijishan cave shrines in Gansu and a corn harvesting scene before a hut in Wulumuqi.

As art director at Atlantic Records and Warner Bro. Records in the United States, Basil Pao had world-class resources like the latest in dye-transfer technology or working with photographers like Richard Avedon. Upon returning to Hong Kong in the 1980s, Pao had to be hands-on in all aspects of graphic production.

To express the fiery passion of George Lam’s Love Fever album, Pao used his training in graphic design and illustration as well as his self-taught photography skills to print Lam’s photograph on watercolour paper and render flames against the sky using photo oil and chalk.

At the time, concerts were more lucrative than record sales for Cantopop stars and record companies. For the Lam 85’ Live concert poster and the related Lam 85’ Special album cover, Pao utilised a larger budget to produce a composite image of Lam’s studio shot with a photo of a gas flare at an oil well, which Pao purchased from an industrial photographer. This was done using high-quality photo-retouching machine only available in Tokyo at the time. When asked if this could be done in an easier way, Pao said, ‘For a concert, people are going to see him live. So the whole fat siu (發燒) (‘fever’ or ‘burning’ in Cantonese) has to be physical. It can’t just be a symbolic representation of fever.’

Starting from 1981, Tina Liu honed a meticulous approach to fashion styling and editorial design at City Magazine, the first local monthly magazine on art and culture that set a new standard for the industry since its founding in 1976. She applied these skills to Deanie Ip’s album You Left Me Here. A sense of emptiness pervades the album art, which is striking in its understatement. Swathed in a sackcloth-like Comme des Garçons dress, Ip stares forlornly from the corner of the inner album sleeve. The lyric booklet hangs on an elastic string attached to the double-jacket gatefold sleeve. The album’s pared-down simplicity and khaki-black contrast, with monochromatic studio shots printed on coarse brown and black paper, emphasised the title track’s theme of abandonment.

For the album Thousand Suns Liu transformed the cosmopolitan sensuality that Deanie Ip expressed in previous albums into an iconic representation of a grand dame. Liu interpreted the sun as a concentration of warmth and richness emanating from the intricately embroidered and patterned temple tapestry, which Liu tailored into Ip’s top. The fabric was photographed and printed to encircle Ip on the die-cut sleeve. Liu’s all-encompassing art direction was evident in Ip’s expressive make-up and hairstyling, specially-selected gold enamel accessories, choreographed posture, and the album title set in Skinny Gold (瘦金體) calligraphic font—known to be invented by Emperor Song to resemble twisted gold filament.

Designer Alan Chan utilised new technology to create a graphic style as flamboyant as Elisa Chan’s personal style. It would be Chan’s only album design resulting from his experimentation with the newly marketed colour copy machine, composed of portraits of Chan’s whimsical expressions that appear to be digitally processed and crudely produced. He moved original photographs of Chan on the glass bed during scanning to generate smears and blurs, played with the colour balance and contrast buttons to adjust the hues and tones, and experimented with running the same image through the copier multiple times to superimpose different images on the same page. The result is a grid of portraits in flat, vibrant blocks of pink, purple, and black, complete with Warhol-esque blots and off-register effects.