Carnival of Dreams

This book offers a glimpse into the wide-ranging 50-year career of the internationally renowned Hong Kong photographer/designer through his work in collages and photomontages. From his early album covers when he was an art director/designer for the music industry in New York, Los Angeles and London in the 1970’s, through his diverse international assignments and personal works, to his most recent exhibition in Hong Kong. The story encompasses the long journey from cut-and-paste collages to the computer-composited photomontages of dreamscapes in this Carnival of Dreams.

In his introduction titled ‘The Man from Everywhere’, Pico Iyer writes: “For decades now, Basil Pao has been the global eye through which I’ve taken in almost every country, as clearly as the world within… I never know where to place Basil; I can’t get my head around him. Album-designer, loving father, covert Chan master—21st century Renaissance man—Basil is always bringing the many worlds inside him together to create something far more than the sum of their parts. Is he a Taoist Fellini? Or just a state-of-the-art contemplative? It doesn’t really matter. For so many years, he’s been giving us the world—wide-angle, close-up, crazy, moving and ravishing. It only makes sense that now he’s showing us whole other worlds, which may be inside us, outside us or both at once. Art’s dream, I believe, is to do just this: stand us on our heads, speak directly to our hearts—and never cease to surprise.” 

Basil Pao is a photographer and graphic designer from Hong Kong who has worked extensively behind the scenes for various film and television productions, notably with the BBC and Michael Palin on numerous travel programs. His stills, travel essays and corporate works have been published widely around the world.