This photograph, probably taken at Sheung Wan’s Poor Man’s Night Club’ in the early 1970s, features in an exhibition of images of Hong Kong showing its transformation from the hard times of the post-war years to the 1970s. Photo: Brian Brake courtesy Wai-man Lau
In 2010 Australian photographer and writer Edward Stokes, who grew up in Hong Kong, crossed paths with a fellow artist. It was an encounter that would change his life.
“My brother and sister were visiting Hong Kong, so we decided to head to The Peak,” says Stokes of the popular tourist spot that provides stunning views of Hong Kong Island. “While there, I noticed an old man selling his prints of 1950s Hong Kong and, as a photographer myself, I was curious.
“We chatted for a bit – me in my broken Cantonese and he in his broken English – but after our initial encounter I didn’t really think about him until I received an email from his niece asking if I would like to see his negatives.”
The rest, as they say, is history.
Rickshaw men haul rattan and wicker baskets laden with produce to market. Photo: the estate of Lee Fook Chee
Hedda Morrison’s photo of a hawker waiting to make a sale. Some of his chickens are tied up with the grass string used by traders, others are in a split-bamboo poultry carrier. Photo: courtesy of the President and Fellows of Harvard College
Rice is offloaded from sampans and junks, and local boys have some summer fun near Wing Lok Street. Photo: the estate of Lee Fook Chee
Tanka women collect fresh water from a fire hydrant. Carrying water to junks and sampans was mostly done by women and children. Photo: the estate of Lee Fook Chee
Bronzed from years spent outdoors, these lightermen were paid by the load. Their ribs reflect the recent wartime food shortages and general hardship. Hedda Morrison held ordinary people, especially manual workers, in high regard. Her photos reflect this lifelong personal respect. Photo: courtesy of the President and Fellows of Harvard College
The man Stokes had met was Lee Fook Chee. Lee was born into a poor family in Singapore on December 1, 1927, and adopted at birth by a studio photographer.
He found his way to Hong Kong in 1947 and lived “a difficult 1940s immigrant life”, Stokes says. Self-taught, Lee became a journeyman photographer and in 1948 started taking and selling portrait photos on The Peak. In 1951 he was paid to take identity photos of Nationalist refugees housed at Rennie’s Mill (now Tiu Keng Leng).
In 2015, Stokes co-wrote Lee Fook Chee’s Hong Kong, a book about Lee’s life journey that featured 140 of his photos. “Sadly Lee died in 2012, aged 84, before the book was published,” he says.
Now Lee’s photos form the centrepiece of a new exhibition, “Recovery; Resilience; Resurgence”, at the Asia Society in Admiralty from December 14 to March 6. It also features photos by Hedda Morrison, a German-Australian photographer who Stokes wrote about in Hong Kong As It Was: Hedda Morrison’s Photos, 1946–47. Photos by Brian Brake, a New Zealand photographer who lived in Hong Kong from the late 1950s to the mid-’70s, are also on show.
The exhibition, presented by the Asia Society Hong Kong and The Photographic Heritage Foundation, which Stokes founded in 2008, is his most ambitious, he says, both in concept and size: it includes 90 framed photos, 14 story panels and personal objects, including the Zeiss Ikonta camera Lee used.
A Public Works Department steamroller at the intersection of Des Voeux Road and Queen Victoria Street. Photo: the estate of Lee Fook Chee
Des Voeux Road, just west of Pedder Street. A delivery man carries his lunch tray; rickshaws ply for trade; and trams clatter past. A tram inspector in his ‘summer whites’ looks past a large saloon. The Siberian Fur Store is on the right. Photo: the estate of Lee Fook Chee
From the late 1950s, textile manufacturing and other clothing industries grew rapidly. By the early 1960s, Hong Kong’s textile manufacturing industry had become the most successful in Asia. Photo: Brian Brake courtesy Wai-man Lau
The Jockey Club’s Happy Valley race stands were expanded in stages between 1955 and 1995. Photo: Brian Brake courtesy Wai-man Lau
Kowloon’s Tsz Wan Shan Resettlement Estate in Kowloon. Built between 1964 and 1971, with 63 blocks it was the largest resettlement estate built in Hong Kong. Seen here in the early to middle 1970s, there is much washing – but not one air conditioner. Photo: Brian Brake courtesy Wai-man Lau
A rooftop school in the Kwun Tong Resettlement Estate. The photo was taken about 1970. Only a few years later, most rooftop schools – critical to the growth of primary education in the 1950s and 1960s – would fade into history. Photo: Brian Brake courtesy Wai-man Lau
“It’s a wonderful reflection of the city’s history that shows not only Hong Kong framed by landscape but also its vast urban changes,” Stokes says.
The images span a period of about 30 years that saw great transformation in Hong Kong, from the post-war recovery in 1946-47, through the resilience of the 1950s, to the resurgence of the 1960s and 1970s, Stokes adds.
Recovery; Resilience; Resurgence, Asia Society Hong Kong Centre, Justice Drive, Admiralty, tel: 2103 9511.
