Biography

Born in Hong Kong and educated in England, Adrian Lo is a classically trained violinist who studied political theory at university, and now makes music, documentary films, and soundtracks for film and television.

Lo’s documentary work has focused on traditional culture and customs, especially handicraft within a contemporary urban context. His debut documentary short A Portrait of Sun Wah Kee (2015) won an award at the World Expo in Milan that year, for exploring the notion of sustainability in food within the context of Cantonese cuisine and Hong Kong’s urban gentrification. This early success led to two further award-winning short films in A Way of Life (2015), which is about Japanese ceramicists in Tochigi and Ibaraki, as well as A Portrait of Linva (2016), about the iconic Chinese dress cheongsam.

In 2016, Adrian Lo produced his debut solo record Absentee and released it as a self-made 7” zine and digitally with Hong Kong label Love Da Records. He has since performed this at various venues and festivals including Clockenflap festival, Macpherson Stadium in Hong Kong, and Feierwerk in Munich. The zine was recently on display at Hong Kong Heritage Museum as part of their exhibition on Hong Kong printing culture.

In 2017, Lo made two documentaries about Hong Kong heritage. Prayer for Peace, which is about Shek O’s traditional Taoist festival Tai Ping Ching Chiu, and Cheongsam: Lost & Found, a programme commissioned by Hong Kong Arts Centre.

In 2018, Adrian Lo moved to Berlin and turned his attention to soundtracks for film and television, plying his trade as sound designer and re-recording mixer. Notable early works include Magdalena Jaroszewicz's experimental short film Shooting Stars as re-recording mixer, Mariko Bobrik's feature film The Taste of Pho and Zeynep Dadak's documentary Invisible to the Eye as sound designer.

Alongside this, he produced and directed a mini-series of documentary short films about Hong Kong’s traditional Chinese handicraft Living Heritage, and released the music single Anaesthesia on 30 June 2020 via Hong Kong label SEEAHOLE.

The highlights of 2021 were working on Oleh Sentsov’s thrilling throwback to 1990s Ukraine - Rhino, which premiered at Venice that year, before sound designing and mixing the extraordinary documentary Eat Your Catfish by Noah Arjomand, Adam Isenberg, and Senem Tusen, which premiered at IDFA, won Best Documentary at the Istanbul Film Festival, before winning an Emmy® Award in the Outstanding Social Issue Documentary category as part of PBS’s POV series.

Since 2022, Lo has continued working on soundtracks for documentary films, including A Provincial Hospital by Ilian Meter, Ivan Chertov, and Zlatina Teneva, which premiered in competition at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, The Gate by Jasmin Herold and Michael Beamish, as well as Hasta que se Apague el Sol by Jonas Brander, and most recently, Friendly Fire by Klaus Fried and Julia Albrecht.

Meanwhile, he has also continued working on soundtracks for narrative features sound-designing the supernatural horror film Here After by Robert Salerno, the cerebral thriller Martin liest den Koran by Jurij Saule, and the forthcoming biopic of surrealist painter Leonora Carrington Leonora in the Morning Light by Thor Klein and Lena Vurma.

Adrian Lo’s brand new single Banyan Blues, released on 19 December 2024, alongside remixes by Sadaharu Fukuoka, and Andreas Vorwerk, have since been available for purchase and streaming on major online platforms.

You can find out more about Adrian Lo’s work in music, sound, and film at the top of this website, or view his filmography on IMDb, and his discography on Spotify. Similarly, links to his various social media pages are at the header of this page, together with a collection of his past interviews and press appearances, and a contact form at the footer should you wish to email him.

Adrian Lo resides in Berlin and is a member of GEMA, DEFKOM, and BVFT.

April 2025.