Photo by Nele Sauer
About
Born in Hong Kong and educated in England, Adrian Lo is a classically trained violinist who read political theory at university, and now makes music, documentary films, and sound for film.
Lo’s documentary work has focused on traditional culture and customs, especially handicraft within a contemporary urban context. His debut documentary short A Portrait of Sun Wah Kee (2015) won an award at the World Expo in Milan that year, for exploring the notion of sustainability in food within the context of Cantonese cuisine and Hong Kong’s urban gentrification. This early success led to two further award-winning short films in A Way of Life (2015), which is about Japanese ceramicists in Tochigi and Ibaraki, as well as A Portrait of Linva (2016), about the iconic Chinese dress cheongsam.
In 2016, Adrian Lo produced his debut solo record ‘Absentee’ and released it as a self-made 7” zine and digitally with Hong Kong label Love Da Records. He has since performed this at various venues and festivals including Clockenflap festival, Macpherson Stadium in Hong Kong, and Feierwerk in Munich. The zine was recently on display at Hong Kong Heritage Museum as part of their exhibition on Hong Kong printing culture.
In 2017, Lo made two documentaries about Hong Kong heritage. Prayer for Peace (2017), which is about Shek O’s traditional Taoist festival Tai Ping Ching Chiu, and Cheongsam: Lost & Found (2017), a program commissioned by Hong Kong Arts Centre.
In 2018, Adrian Lo moved to Berlin and turned his attention to audio production for film and television, plying his trade as sound designer and re-recording mixer. Notable early works include Magdalena Jaroszewicz's experimental short film Shooting Stars (2019) as re-recording mixer, Mariko Bobrik's feature film The Taste of Pho (2020) and Zeynep Dadak's documentary Invisible to the Eye (2020) as sound designer.
Alongside this, in 2020, he produced and directed his latest documentary project about Hong Kong’s traditional Chinese handicraft Living Heritage (2020), and released his latest musical work the single ‘Anaesthesia’ on 30 June via Hong Kong label SEEAHOLE.
The highlights of 2021 were working on Oleh Sentsov’s thrilling throwback to 1990s Ukraine - Rhino, before sound designing and mixing the extraordinary documentary Eat Your Catfish, which premiered at IDFA back in November and continues its journey on the festival circuit.
Since 2022, Lo has been re-recording mixer for the documentary film A Provincial Hospital by Ilian Meter, Ivan Chertov, and Zlatina Teneva, which premiered in competition at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, sound designer for the documentary film The Gate by Jasmin Herold & Michael Beamish, as well as sound designer/ supervising sound editor for the forthcoming narrative feature Was von der Liebe bleibt by Kanwal Sethi.
You can find out more about Adrian Lo’s work in music, sound, and film at the top of this website, or view his filmography on IMDb, and his discography on Spotify. Similarly, links to his various social media pages are below, together with a collection of his past interviews and press appearances, a photo gallery, and a contact form should you wish to email him.
Berlin, July 2023.
