Six degrees of separation from celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz

Annie Leibovitz chose an empty factory in an old Kennedy Town industrial building as the Hong Kong home of her latest exhibition, “Women: New Portraits”, which runs until next Sunday. The American photographer – a “living legend”, according to the United States Library of Congress – is known for her striking celebrity photos, such as the 1981 Rolling Stone magazine cover that portrays a naked John Lennon curled up next to a clothed Yoko Ono, taken five hours before his murder. Pictured in Leibovitz’s Hong Kong exhibition are 22 notable women, from Nobel Peace Prize recipients Aung San Suu Kyi and Malala Yousafzai to singer Adele, actress Yao Chen and ballerina Misty Copeland …

Until Copeland’s rise to stardom with the American Ballet Theatre last year, “there had never been a black female principal dancer at a major international company”, it is claimed in A Ballerina’s Tale, a documentary recounting her struggles. Despite not taking up ballet until her teens, while sharing a “shaggy motel room” with five siblings and her mother, Copeland was performing professionally just over a year after her first dance class. She was part of an inspired pairing last year when The Late Show with Stephen Colbert invited her to perform accompanied by cellist Yo-Yo Ma …

Named “the sexiest classical musician” by People magazine in 2001, Ma has released more than 90 albums, 18 of which have won Grammy awards. The Chinese-American settled on the cello after first trying the violin and viola. But his love of the large does not extend to creepy-crawlies; he admitted to Vanity Fair this month that his greatest fear is “very large bugs”. Several film soundtracks feature Ma’s cello performances, including Seven Years in Tibet, Memoirs of a Geisha and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a 2000 martial-arts film set during the reign of the Qianlong Emperor …