Yee Chung-man (Kenneth Yee, born in Hong Kong on 24 November 1951) is a Hong Kong film art director and costume designer who has also worked as a director. Entering the industry in the early 1980s, he was already working as a film art director by 1982, designing films such as Aces Go Places III (1984), Happy Ghost II (1985) and The Legend of Wisely (1987). His eerie, classical sets for A Chinese Ghost Story (1987) — his first period production — won Best Art Direction at the 7th Hong Kong Film Awards. He has long collaborated with directors including Peter Chan and Zhang Yimou across period and contemporary subjects, and has designed album covers and concert and musical staging and costumes for singers such as Jacky Cheung and Kelly Chen. He won Best Art Direction again at the 16th Hong Kong Film Awards for Comrades: Almost a Love Story (1997), Best Costume & Make-Up Design at the 23rd for The Twins Effect (2004), and both categories at the 27th for The Warlords (2008). A six-time winner of the Hong Kong Film Awards' Best Costume & Make-Up Design, he has also received the Golden Horse Award for Best Art Direction. In 2006 his costume design for Zhang Yimou's Curse of the Golden Flower earned a nomination for Best Costume Design at the 79th Academy Awards and a Costume Designers Guild Award nomination. Beyond cinema he has worked in theatre, advertising and album art, and directed Anna Magdalena (1998) and And I Hate You So (2000).
Yee brought both scholarship and poetry to the look of Chinese-language cinema and raised the standing of costume and production design; his Oscar nomination for Curse of the Golden Flower made him one of the few Hong Kong filmmakers so honoured, and his stage and concert designs extended the craft beyond film.
Achievements
- 1988 · Won Best Art Direction at the 7th Hong Kong Film Awards for A Chinese Ghost Story
- 1997 · Won Best Art Direction at the 16th Hong Kong Film Awards for Comrades: Almost a Love Story
- 2007 · Nominated for Best Costume Design at the 79th Academy Awards for Curse of the Golden Flower
- 2008 · Won Best Art Direction and Best Costume & Make-Up Design at the 27th Hong Kong Film Awards for The Warlords