Edith Cheung is a Hong Kong costume and production designer, textile researcher and curator. A graduate of the Hong Kong Polytechnic's fashion design department in 1982, she worked in fashion in Europe and America before returning to Hong Kong in the late 1980s, when the art director Leung Wah-sang brought her into film. Under the director King Hu she did the preliminary costume work for Swordsman (1990), which brought her a Golden Horse nomination, and for Yim Ho's Red Dust (1990) she won both Best Art Direction (shared with Liu Fung-ping) and Best Costume Design at the 27th Golden Horse Awards. In 1990 she founded the Fashion Workshop Ltd, which supplied costume research and production for more than 250 films. The Hong Kong Film Awards introduced a Best Costume Design prize in 1993, and between 1993 and 1998 her workshop served twenty-six of the thirty-five nominated films, eight of which won, among them Swordsman II (1992), The Bride with White Hair (1993), Ashes of Time (1994) and The Soong Sisters (1997). She served as vice-chairman of the Hong Kong Film Arts Association. Leaving the film world, she ran a fabric studio called Cloth Haven from 2004 to 2014, wrote more than 120 articles for a Ming Pao Weekly column between 2010 and 2015, and from 2010 to 2015 was head of the textile department of the Shanghai Jin Ze Arts Centre, overseeing over five thousand textile and costume pieces. She has advised and curated for institutions including the China National Silk Museum, the Hong Kong Design Institute, CHAT and the Shenzhen Design Society.
Cheung brought rigorous textile and costume research into Hong Kong film design, making period costumes truer to historical sources. Her Fashion Workshop supplied research and production for over 250 films, helping establish costume design as a respected craft in the local film industry.
Achievements
- 1982 · Graduated from the fashion design department of the Hong Kong Polytechnic
- 1990 · Won Best Art Direction and Best Costume Design at the 27th Golden Horse Awards for Red Dust
- 2010 · Began writing the 'Cloth Beauty' column for Ming Pao Weekly