Annie Leibovitz picks long-empty factory as Hong Kong venue for Women exhibition
‘I love the history of this room,’ famed photographer says of Kennedy Town space, empty for 20 years, where she is showing portraits of women of ‘outstanding achievement’, including Aung San Suu Kyi and Yao Chen
Annie Leibovitz, the American photographer best known for her perfectly lit and elegant shots of the rich and famous, has chosen a run-down, unassuming industrial building in Kennedy Town as her exhibition venue in Hong Kong – a vote against gentrification.
Her “Women: New Portraits” show, which is on a 10-city tour, will take over the third floor of the Cheung Hing Industrial Building for just over three weeks. The 44-year-old building – at the bottom of Smithfield Road in the until recently gritty neighbourhood on the northwestern tip of Hong Kong Island – is of note only because its various owners in 2014 collectively turned down a takeover offer by the Urban Renewal Authority, which wanted to knock it down and replace it with a block of flats.
Leibovitz is showing dozens of portraits of women she and her friend Gloria Steinem, the American feminist, have selected for their “outstanding achievements”.
They includes recent works commissioned by UBS, the Swiss bank sponsoring the touring exhibition, as well as older magazine shoots, photographs from Women, the book she co-created with Susan Sontag in 1999, and images from her private collection, such as a mesmerising, black-and-white portrait of her mother.