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Friday, April 17, 2020
Memes and satire on Hong Kong’s front lines
Away
from the current clashes between police and protesters, artists and
digital activists are using parodies and humor to protest the crackdown
Text by
Antony Dapiran
For nine consecutive weekends, the people of Hong Kong have taken to
the streets in anti-government protests that have rocked the
international financial center once considered one of Asia’s safest
cities. What began as peaceful opposition to a proposed law that
would enable criminal suspects to be extradited from Hong Kong to
mainland China has evolved into a sometimes violent campaign for
democracy. Protesters have built barricades and armed themselves with
umbrellas and lengths of bamboo, while police have charged at them with
batons and pepper spray. But away from the front lines, a quieter but equally important
revolution is unfolding on the city’s walls, and on the internet. In
this campaign, art and imagery are the weapons. You can see it on the
“Lennon Walls” that have sprouted up across the city—where thousands of
post-its and artworks let protesters express their vision of Hong Kong.
Two
drawings of human Lennon Walls, where protesters use post-its and
artworks to express their vision of Hong Kong. Illustrations by
Badiucao.
The battle for Hong Kong has been taking place not only in the city’s
streets. The online world of information has been an equally active
arena of conflict — so much so that Hong Kong’s digital activists refer
to themselves as the “Keyboard Front Line.” In this leaderless movement, coordination among the protesters has been taking place in forums like LIHKG —
a lo-fi Hong Kong version of Reddit – and Telegram chat groups. Protest
actions are proposed and voted upon in online polls, and messages
passed among protesters on the ground via Telegram or, increasingly,
AirDrop — a peer-to-peer technology that does not rely on mobile network
availability. But though the movement is grassroots and democratic,
several dissident artists play a key role.
Satire from Shanghai via Melbourne
I met the Chinese artist Badiucao at a cafe on the quiet back streets
of Melbourne, Australia, a long way from Hong Kong’s chaotic clashes.
Originally from Shanghai but residing in Australia for over ten years,
Badiucao’s satirical artwork, which often mocks the Chinese authorities,
first came to prominence in Hong Kong during the Umbrella Movement
protests of 2014. He has since been a regular contributor to Hong Kong
independent English-language news organization, Hong Kong Free Press. Although Badiucao has never lived in Hong Kong, the protests are
personal. Last year, a major exhibition of his work set to be held in
Hong Kong was abruptly cancelled following threats made to his family in
the mainland. His own situation, he says, is symptomatic of the broader
erosion of civil liberties in Hong Kong. “I have always received so
much help and support from the Hong Kong community, both before and
after my show was cancelled,” Badiucao explains. After the cancellation,
supporters printed out posters of his work and pasted them across the
facade of a state-owned bookstore. “It’s sad for me to witness these
good people and this great community being destroyed,” he says. “I can’t
stay silent in the face of that.” Badiucao’s work remains banned in China. Yet a major piece — a
large-scale neon depiction of Nobel prize-winning dissident Liu Xiaobo
and his wife Liu Xia — was fabricated in China, through the Taobao
online sourcing site owned and operated by mainland internet giant
Alibaba. Badiucao chuckles, “The censorship system is so effective on
the mainland they didn’t even know what they are making is banned.” In the current protests, Badiucao’s art poses as much of a challenge
to Beijing’s authority in the city as do the protesters. “My artwork
dissolves their authority,” the artist says. “Satire, humor and
absurdity are extremely powerful in deconstructing the arrogance of
power.” On the morning of July 1, as Hong Kong’s chief executive Carrie Lam held an official event to
mark the anniversary of the handover, police pepper-sprayed protesters
who had massed outside the venue. Badiucao’s response was almost
instantaneous. Within hours, his version of the official photograph of
Lam’s toast, with symbols of the protests — hard-hat, umbrella and
raincoat — floating in a sea of blood, was circulating online.
Badiucao’s recent illustration of Hong Kong’s chief executive Carrie Lam, floating in a sea of blood. In another recent disturbing incident, Triad gang mobs attacked commuters
in a suburban train station while police appeared to stand by without
taking action. The police version of events was that they did not see
any armed people in the vicinity. When images emerged of police standing
and chatting to the armed thugs, Badiucao adapted those images to give
his view of the cozy relationship between the police and the organized
crime gangs. Observes Badiucao, “Wrestling directly with power is not
always wise, but if you embarrass them, then you can really drive them
crazy.” But though big-name artists have played an important role, regular
protesters have also contributed vast amounts of satirical, biting art. Online, protesters have distributed vast amounts of memes, satire and
protest artwork generated by the movement. Today, any commuter on the
city’s subway system with the AirDrop function on their phone turned on
will invariably receive several unsolicited protest-themed graphics or
memes on any given day.
Badiucao’s art directly pokes fun at the authoritarian nature of power in Hong Kong. Illustration by Badiucao.
One popular satirical comment of the protests is the “missing finger salute” aimed at police. Illustration by Badiucao.
The creativity and complexity some of these works show are impressive, such as an anime-style short movie illustrating the protesters’ demands, which was produced in multiple languages and circulated online. Many of the creative works respond to current events and images which
have appeared in the press. For example, after shoppers were caught up
in a violent clash between protesters and police in the suburban New
Town shopping mall, with protesters alleging that mall management were
complicit in allowing the police to attack them, online satirists
created a poster for the mall depicting the mayhem with the slogan “A
whole new shopping experience.” The works also create an often satirical counter-narrative to the
official version of events promulgated by the Hong Kong government and
police. Online remixers took advantage of the irresistible opportunity
presented by officials from Beijing’s Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office
giving a press conference in front of a plain blue screen to subvert
Beijing’s message and insert their own. After the New Town mall clashes,
police reported that a protester had bitten off an officer’s finger.
When footage subsequently emerged to show that, not only had the finger
merely been bitten but remained attached but that the incident had
occurred only when the officer in question fish-hooked a protester’s
mouth, the online satirists went to work. The image quickly made its way
back onto the streets, with protesters reportedly giving a “missing
finger salute” to taunt police. This interaction between the online and offline worlds, between the
information war and the conflict on the streets, has been a notable
feature of the Hard Hat Revolution protests. As official and
counter-narratives compete, artists have often found themselves at the
center of this vortex. Kokdamon, a Hong Kong artist currently based in Switzerland, created
his image of Tank Man holding up a mobile phone in June to commemorate
the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Some activist
friends asked him if they could borrow the image for a rally in Hong
Kong to mark that occasion, and from there the image took on a life of
its own. In recent weeks, it has appeared on signs carried by elderly
Hong Kong protesters joining a “silver-haired march” to support the
young front-line activists. “I wanted the image to show that we have no fear of keeping a record
of what’s happening,” says Kokdamon. “I never expected my image to
spread in this way, but I am touched that it has. I hope that it can
help people to think about their responsibility, and their power.” Reflecting on the role visual expression has played in the present
protest movement, in particular on the Lennon Walls, Kokdamon says,
“This has in some ways shaken the whole position and role of artists.
It’s not just artists responding, it’s ordinary citizens — the people
are the ones who are standing up and expressing themselves. It’s
beautiful.” Still, the protests have given a boost to censored artists like
Badiucao. His images are widely circulated online and can also be found
on Lennon Walls across the city. “When my show in Hong Kong was
cancelled, my gallery was stripped away from me,” he says. “But now,
with my work in the hands of the protesters out on the streets, the
whole city is my gallery! I don’t think any artist could ask for more
than that.”
This
interaction between the online world of artists like Badiucao and
protesters has been a feature of the protests. “Satire, humor and
absurdity are extremely powerful in deconstructing the arrogance of
power,” says the artist. All illustrations by Badiucao.
The power of ideas
Authorities in Beijing have responded to the protesters in a way that
recognizes the dangerous power of ideas. On the mainland, a news
blackout on the protests was lifted recently to enable state-owned media
to issue stories characterizing the movement as a foreign-led “color
revolution” plot. In recent weeks, pro-Beijing elements arranged to bus
in several coachloads of mainland tourists in the dead of night to
destroy one of the city’s largest Lennon Walls. They tore down posters
and festooned the walls with the national flags of the eight foreign
nations which invaded China during the Opium Wars era. They also left
large funeral wreaths with the photographs of Hong Kong pro-democracy
politicians and Taiwan’s independence-leaning President Tsai Ing-wen. Word spread quickly online, and the next morning volunteers were hard
at work scrubbing the walls to clean up the mess left by the
pro-Beijing group. By lunchtime, a new Lennon Wall was blooming again.
The activists retained the funeral wreaths and replaced the photos with
images of Carrie Lam and her unpopular cabinet. They did, however, make
one addition: a sign reading, “Thank you Mainland compatriots for
donating the flowers!”
Antony Dapiran is a Hong Kong-based writer and lawyer and
the author of “City of Protest: A Recent History of Dissent in Hong
Kong,” published by Penguin.
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