An exhibition featuring scenes and memorabilia from pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong opened on Wednesday in Taipei, featuring work by artists from Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Australia and other nations.
Some of the 66 participating artists, including 45 from Hong Kong, used posters, the front pages of newspapers and other items to recreate scenes from the Hong Kong protests, which started in June last year.
Among the 100-plus exhibits is a drawing by Hong Kong artist Kay Wong, which shows two photojournalists wearing helmets, on the otherwise blank front page of Apple Daily’s Hong Kong edition on July 4 last year.
Photo: Wang Yi-sung, Taipei Times
The idea for the exhibition originated from the public response to the February edition of the Creative Comic Collection (CCC) magazine, which featured images associated with the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement, CCC project manager Huang Guan-hua (黃冠華) said.
“I thought that because of Taiwan’s place at the center of freedom and democracy in the Chinese-speaking world, this [exhibition] was something we could and should do,” Huang said at the opening ceremony at Taipei Comic Base, which organized the exhibition jointly with the CCC.
The exhibition’s curator Chen Yi-ching (陳怡靜), a freelance journalist who went to Hong Kong four times in the past year to cover the pro-democracy protests, said there were some notable differences between that campaign and the 2014 “Umbrella movement” in the territory.
In 2014, protesters occupied Hong Kong’s Central district from late September to mid-December with sit-ins, but the current demonstrations are more like an urban guerrilla action, as protesters have staged gatherings that resemble flash mobs at locations throughout the territory, she said.
Chen said the central strategy of the ongoing leaderless protests is to remain fluid, as reflected in the images posted on “Lennon walls” and shared on Instagram, Telegram and other social media sites, which helped create a bond among the protesters.
Some of the protest scenes are highlighted in the exhibition, including a Lennon wall in an underpass at the Kwai Fong railway station, and a replica of the Hong Kong police headquarters.
The free exhibition also offers a virtual reality experience of the protests, as well as guided tours every 30 minutes between 1:30pm and 4pm, which are available in English and Japanese with a one-week advanced booking.
The exhibition is open from Tuesday to Sunday, from 10am to 9pm, through July 26.
A small number of Taiwanese this year lost their citizenship rights after traveling in China and obtaining a one-time Chinese passport to cross the border into Russia, a source said today. The people signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of neighboring Russia with companies claiming they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, the source said on condition of anonymity. The travelers were actually issued one-time-use Chinese passports, they said. Taiwanese are prohibited from holding a Chinese passport or household registration. If found to have a Chinese ID, they may lose their resident status under Article 9-1
Taiwanese were praised for their composure after a video filmed by Taiwanese tourists capturing the moment a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck Japan’s Aomori Prefecture went viral on social media. The video shows a hotel room shaking violently amid Monday’s quake, with objects falling to the ground. Two Taiwanese began filming with their mobile phones, while two others held the sides of a TV to prevent it from falling. When the shaking stopped, the pair calmly took down the TV and laid it flat on a tatami mat, the video shows. The video also captured the group talking about the safety of their companions bathing
PROBLEMATIC APP: Citing more than 1,000 fraud cases, the government is taking the app down for a year, but opposition voices are calling it censorship Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday decried a government plan to suspend access to Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu (小紅書) for one year as censorship, while the Presidential Office backed the plan. The Ministry of the Interior on Thursday cited security risks and accusations that the Instagram-like app, known as Rednote in English, had figured in more than 1,700 fraud cases since last year. The company, which has about 3 million users in Taiwan, has not yet responded to requests for comment. “Many people online are already asking ‘How to climb over the firewall to access Xiaohongshu,’” Cheng posted on
A classified Pentagon-produced, multiyear assessment — the Overmatch brief — highlighted unreported Chinese capabilities to destroy US military assets and identified US supply chain choke points, painting a disturbing picture of waning US military might, a New York Times editorial published on Monday said. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s comments in November last year that “we lose every time” in Pentagon-conducted war games pitting the US against China further highlighted the uncertainty about the US’ capability to intervene in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “It shows the Pentagon’s overreliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons as adversaries field cheap, technologically
RSS