Pau Kai-ming, who later took the name Peter Pau, was born in Hong Kong on 2 June 1952 and became one of the territory's foremost cinematographers, as well as a producer and director. He came from an acting family: his father Pao Fong was an actor and Cantonese opera performer, his mother Liu Su a stage actress, and his elder sister Nina Paw later won Best Actress at the Hong Kong Film Awards for The Way We Are. As a boy he accompanied his family onto film sets but chose to work behind the camera. At about twenty-seven he went to the United States to study film, and on his return worked his way up from camera assistant to director of photography, active in Hong Kong cinema through the 1980s and 1990s. In 1992 he won Best Cinematography at the 11th Hong Kong Film Awards for Saviour of the Soul. In 1993 he shot The Bride with White Hair, starring Leslie Cheung and Brigitte Lin, taking Best Cinematography again at the 13th Hong Kong Film Awards and a Golden Horse nomination. In 2000 he was cinematographer on Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and in 2001 won both the 20th Hong Kong Film Award and the 73rd Academy Award for Best Cinematography, becoming the first Chinese cinematographer to win the Oscar and still the only one; he was also nominated for a BAFTA that year. In 2002 he made his directorial debut with The Touch, starring Michelle Yeoh, bringing Hollywood-style production and international distribution experience to Chinese-language cinema. In 2005 he photographed Peter Chan's Perhaps Love, sharing Best Cinematography at the 25th Hong Kong Film Awards with Christopher Doyle, and also winning at the 43rd Golden Horse Awards and the 8th Changchun Film Festival. He has continued to work as a cinematographer and producer in Hong Kong and mainland China.
By winning the Academy Award for Best Cinematography for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Pau became a landmark figure for Chinese cinematographers on the world stage, and the film's bamboo-grove and desert imagery helped define the visual language of Chinese-language martial-arts cinema in the new millennium.
Achievements
- 1992 · Won Best Cinematography at the 11th Hong Kong Film Awards for Saviour of the Soul
- 1994 · Won Best Cinematography at the 13th Hong Kong Film Awards for The Bride with White Hair
- 2001 · Won the 73rd Academy Award for Best Cinematography for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the first Chinese winner
- 2006 · Won Best Cinematography at the 25th Hong Kong Film Awards for Perhaps Love