Photographer John Fung, ‘one of the last true Hong Kong Bohemians’

Fung made his name in the 1970s and ’80s with his tender, yet unflinching black-and-white images of Hong Kong street life that broke away from the manicured, mainstream “salon style” at the time.

Fung patrolled the city with his camera, capturing the irony, despair (and hope, too) on the faces of those easily overlooked as the economy roared ahead.

They are haunting images that would break your heart: a female beggar sitting at the feet of a balloon vendor who is resting his back in the covered walkway outside Prince’s Building in Central; the fortune-teller with a bandaged hand, waiting for business at a makeshift Temple Street stall.

Those older works were introduced to a new audience in 2005 when they were published in a monograph.

Like most professional photographers, Fung rarely pointed the camera at himself. But in the monograph, a work titled “Father” shows Fung’s left hand gripping his dying father’s in hospital.

It was a row with his father that drove the young Fung to run away from home, he told Post Magazine in 2021, and acquire first-hand knowledge of poverty; he picked up any kind of work to get a roof over his head at night.

His easy charm and good looks helped. He moved in artistic circles, had lovers and never married. Money earned from being a life drawing model was spent on his first roll of film (he had already bought a Voigtländer camera before he left home).

Self-taught in just about everything (except for dancing the tango – he did go to classes for that), he was cast in films ranging from a now-forgotten South Korean erotic movie to one of the best films to have captured the uncertainties in pre-handover Hong Kong, the 1992 To Liv(e).

His last cameo role on the big screen was in Ann Hui’s 2010 All About Love, when he played himself, a flâneur with his camera, sauntering up the Central escalator.

He was also, until he sold his share in the early 2000s, a legendary host at the Black Sheep restaurants in Shek O and Sai Kung, best known for affordable Western food, wine and great atmosphere.

But photography was his lifelong passion. Chan Koon-chung, the novelist and founder of City Magazine, was among the first to publish Fung’s work. In the 1980s, Fung’s piercing street photography won him scholarships to London and New York, the latter being an Asian Cultural Council residency.

While in New York, he encountered stand-up comedy for the first time. “It made me realise I think too much; I realised I needn’t take things so seriously,” he said.

But he did take things seriously, except for material comfort.

In 2004, he quit his job of seven years as staff photographer for the Ming Pao Weekly magazine because, as he said at the time, he wanted to devote himself to humanist causes and to pursue art freely.

He began teaching photography. He recorded the devastation of the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia and Africa for Oxfam and Greenpeace, and created a memorable 2005 Oxfam “Say No to Dumping” photo campaign that featured Hong Kong celebrities such as Anthony Wong Yiu-ming, Denise Ho Wan-see, Alex Fong Lik-san and Karen Mok Man-wai having milk and foodstuffs dumped on their heads.

He moved his home from idyllic Lamma Island to Tai Kok Tsui, in West Kowloon, where the contrast between new luxury estates and old tenement buildings provided the dystopian backdrop for a new artistic experiment: surreal juxtapositions using multiple exposure.

That yielded a highly acclaimed series called “One Square Foot” – and a photo book produced by Hong Kong publisher MCCM. Those images are as much about the artifice of high land prices as looking for truths beneath the surface.

Despite being published and having occasional exhibitions, he found it difficult to sustain himself financially in this most expensive of cities. Increasingly disillusioned with the art market, with politics and with worsening inequality, his art became more and more abstract.

The full range of his work is featured in his last book, Let There Be Light (2021), which shows the progression from his early street photography to his most recent focus on plants, water and light in motion.

“If people would attend to the subtleties of nature, the abstract truth that the world is eternally changing will be revealed. My photography aims not to make a shadowy carbon copy of reality, but to create poetry that inspires the soul,” he wrote.

Fellow photographer and friend Roy Lee says of Fung: “John was a black sheep in a borderless savanna. The camera he carried every day on his shoulder was a charm that guarded him against that eternal, unresolved question, ‘What does it mean to exist’?”

Photographer Leung Yiu-hong, meanwhile, says: “John was an icon, with his central parted hair in beautiful natural grey, his distinctive uniform of a white linen shirt and beige trench coat. He always carried his camera with him along with his rolling tobacco and a slightly bitter smile on his photogenic face.

“I remember a special occasion when I encountered him at dawn after an important night in 2014. He surprised me by tapping my shoulder from behind, gave me his signature smile and we shared a cigarette together while watching the rising sun in Mong Kok.

“It was a moment of peace and serenity that I will always cherish.

“John was a free spirit, and he will always be remembered as such.”

A wake for John Fung will be conducted at Hau Sze Hall, International Funeral Parlour, 8 Cheong Hang Road, Hung Hom, from 5pm to 9pm on July 6, followed by a Buddhist funeral ceremony at 9am to 10am on July 7.