Jazz artists’ photos from Hong Kong’s vibrant musical past to go on show at the Fringe Club
- Elaine Liu, one of Hong Kong’s top home-grown jazz vocalists, began shooting her fellow musicians in the 1990s, capturing playful black-and-white portraits
- A selection of her best photos will be hung at the Fringe Dairy, showing star artists in often surprising ways and recalling lost venues
With music venues allowed to open again in Hong Kong, an exhibition of photographs of some of the city’s best jazz artists, shot by one of their own, can soon be seen by the public.
Singer Elaine Liu is one of the city’s top home-grown jazz vocalists. She also happens to be an accomplished photographer. As a singer, she performs regularly in different settings, and occasionally plays the double bass, but is probably best known as the featured vocalist of the Saturday Night Jazz Orchestra, and later the Happy-Go-Lucky Bigband.
With the exception of this past year, the two big bands have been playing the last Saturday of every month at the Fringe Club since 1990.
Over the years, Liu hasn’t just been interpreting jazz standards with her accompanists. She has also turned her lens on her fellow musicians, capturing them in playful black-and-white portraits. When the Fringe Club’s director, Benny Chia, recently gave the Fringe Dairy performing space a makeover, he decided to hang 13 of Liu’s best photos as fitting and low-key decor.
“I started taking them around 1998,” Liu recalls. “They were all done on film. I was a photographer already and I was starting to become a musician too. I took pictures when we were rehearsing. Then I thought maybe I should do something more artistic, so I started conjuring these funny set-ups … Nobody took it seriously, so I put them in strange, funny situations. It was a great laugh.”
