At Hong Kong Protests, Art That Imitates Life

Instagram-ready works of art and graphic design — sometimes whimsical, mostly anonymous — are defining features of the city’s antigovernment demonstrations.
By Mike Ives
Photographs by Lam Yik Fei

HONG KONG — Soon after a woman in Hong Kong was hit in the eye at a protest, her likeness began circulating as a meme on internet forums where many demonstrators blamed her injury on the police. 

Within a couple of weeks, protesters had raised over $25,000 online to build a 13-foot statue of her.
They called it Lady Liberty Hong Kong, a nod to the Statue of Liberty in New York City.
Street art and graphic design are defining features of the pro-democracy demonstrations that have roiled the semiautonomous Chinese territory since June. 

Artists often work quickly and anonymously, and present their oeuvres either in Reddit-like internet forums or public places with heavy foot traffic.
Much of the art channels pop-cultural aesthetics taken from Marvel Comics and Japanese anime. 

And in a financial hub where legions of young people are glued to Instagram, even the street art seems designed to go viral online.
Some protest artworks depict the movement’s heroes — including Lady Liberty Hong Kong and a demonstrator in a yellow raincoat who fell from a building in June — in somber, reverential terms. Others are whimsical sendups of Chinese officials, including Carrie Lam, the city’s embattled leader.
These pop art-style posters of Lam, below, were designed to be stepped on as pedestrians cross a bridge leading to a train station in the city’s Tsing Yi district.

The poster below, on a wall in the Ma On Shan district in northeastern Hong Kong, likens front line protesters to the protagonists of a battle scene in a famous Eugène Delacroix's oil painting Liberty Leading the People, 1830.

In the foreground, a protester wearing a helmet waves a black flag that shows a dead Bauhinia, Hong Kong’s official flower.

The posters in the image below are plastered on the ceiling of a pedestrian underpass in the Kwai Fong district in northern Hong Kong. 

They depict a protester named Chan Yi-chun, who was arrested last month during clashes with the police.

The center drawing below shows Lam, Hong Kong’s chief executive, wiping away tears while simultaneously aiming a gun resting on her lap. 

The poster illustrates a popular sentiment in the antigovernment camp: that while Lam has presented herself publicly as empathetic, she has privately encouraged police violence against demonstrators.

Many protest artworks, like the one below in the Tai Po district, depict subjects in face masks, which demonstrators use to conceal their identities. 

When Lam invoked emergency powers in early October to ban face coverings during protests, she set off further demonstrations.

The image below shows one of the many so-called Lennon Walls that began springing up across town in June. 

The walls are named for one in Prague on which young people in the 1980s posted messages airing their grievances against the Communist regime that ruled Czechoslovakia.

The drawing in red below, of the woman who was injured in the eye during a protest in August, was on display during a rally later that month at Hong Kong’s international airport.

One of the largest Lennon Walls in Hong Kong sits near a complex of government buildings that includes the city’s legislature. 

A small group of hard-core protesters stormed and vandalized the legislative chamber on July 1, the anniversary of the former British colony’s handover to Chinese control in 1997.

Some critics of the Chinese government have mocked Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, by saying that he resembles Winnie the Pooh, the cartoon bear. 

The street collage below was photographed on Oct. 1, hours after Xi presided over a military parade celebrating the 70th anniversary of Communist rule in China.

Protesters have also papered some sidewalks with black-and-white pictures of Xi himself. 

The idea was for passers-by to step on his face, symbolically erasing his presence.

Thousands of protesters sit in at Hong Kong airport to reiterate their ‘five demands’

• “Please forgive us for the ‘unexpected’ Hong Kong,” said the leaflets that were handed out to arrival passengers at the Hong Kong International Airport. “You’ve arrived in a broken, torn-apart city, not the one you have once pictured. Yet for this Hong Kong, we fight.”
• The demonstrations started as peaceful political rallies in June but have escalated to a wider, pro-democracy movement.

By Grace Shao


Several hundreds of protesters, many of them young and donning black T-shirts, handed out anti-government flyers in more than 16 languages to arrival passengers at the Hong Kong International Airport on Friday.
“Please forgive us for the ‘unexpected’ Hong Kong,” the English leaflets read. 

“You’ve arrived in a broken, torn-apart city, not the one you have once pictured. Yet for this Hong Kong, we fight,” the flyers said according to Reuters.
Protesters said they wanted to reiterate their demands and put their case “in front of an international audience,” according to social media posts from demonstrators.
The massive travel hub connects the city to more than 220 global destinations and served 74.7 million passengers last year, according to the airport’s website.
Airport authorities said only departing passengers with travel documents will be allowed to enter Terminal 1 on Friday morning, as the airport braces for what protesters are describing as a three-day event. 

The terminal serves long-haul flights.
Online platforms such as Instagram, Telegram, Airdrop and local Hong Kong forums have become the main means of organization among protesters because they give some anonymity to users.
The demands were originally released in July, a day after a small group of protesters stormed the Hong Kong legislature:

1. a full withdrawal of a proposed bill that would allow Hong Kong people to be extradited to mainland China
2. a retraction of any characterization of the movement as a “riot”
3. a retraction of charges against anti-extradition protesters
4. an independent committee to investigate the Hong Kong police’s use of force
5. universal suffrage in elections for the city’s chief executive officer and legislature by 2020.

So far, Hong Kong authorities have given no concessions, though Chief Executive Carrie Lam “suspended” the extradition bill last month.
Thursday afternoon in the United States, a U.S. State Department spokeswoman called China a “thuggish regime” for disclosing photographs and personal details of a U.S. diplomat who met with student leaders of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement.
Beijing on Wednesday released a photo showing leaders of the movement — including Joshua Wong, the face and leader of the 2014 Umbrella Movement— with an American diplomat. 

Chinese authorities have asked the U.S. to explain why that contact was made and to explain the nature of their relationship.
On Friday morning, officials confirmed that the police commander who dealt with the 2014 demonstrations has been recalled to help settle the ongoing social unrest.
Alan Lau Yip-shing, a former deputy police commissioner, has been appointed to handle large-scale public order events and to direct activities around the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, which is October 1.

Why are Hong Kongers protesting?
Hundreds of thousands of people in Hong Kong have taken to the streets since early June, spurred by opposition to a bill that would allow people in Hong Kong to be extradited to mainland China. 

That proposal has been suspended — though not fully withdrawn.
Demonstrations have since evolved into a movement calling for autonomy, full democracy and the ousting of the embattled leader Lam.
Beijing has responded saying Hong Kong is facing its worst crisis since the handover from the United Kingdom in 1997, and the communist government has used increasingly pointed language to describe the protests.

Problems that go beyond politics
The demonstrations started as peaceful political rallies but have escalated to a broader, pro-democracy movement. 

The size of crowds on the streets and rising violence have called the well-being of Asia’s financial hub into question.
Flights were canceled by Hong Kong’s largest airline, Cathay Pacific on Monday, as part of a general strike that halted the city.
The United States raised its travel warning for Hong Kong on Wednesday, advising Americans to exercise caution when visiting the city.
Also Wednesday, a senior Cathay Pacific executive said the company is facing a decline in bookings for travel to Hong Kong. 

The “double digits” drop is largely due to widespread protests in the Asian financial center, he said.
Retail, real estate and other business sectors have also seen sales declines over the last few months. The city’s public transit system has also been disrupted on multiple occasions.
The discontent from protesters may go beyond politics. 

While the city’s rich have grown richer, the wealth gap in the city has grown wider, according to David Dodwell, a long-time observer of Asia politics.
Many people feel left behind and neglected by the government, and their frustration is fueling increasingly disruptive protests that have coursed through the city, said Dodwell, who is executive director at HK-APEC Trade Policy Group and a former Financial Times Asia correspondent.
“There is a very widespread anxiety in Hong Kong among the ordinary working person about their prospects going forward,” Dodwell told CNBC. 

He added that more than 90% of local Hong Kongers work for small and medium-sized enterprises, which have not seen the kind of economic growth that big multinational corporations have.