I had planned to write an article that would act like a love letter to artworks that are not technically books but feel bookish to me; instead, given the results of the election, I have been constantly reminded of the topic of my final paper for an art history class I took recently on Contemporary Chinese Art. The topic I chose was Zines and Collective Identity in Hong Kong.
In that paper, I argued that zines provided an exceptional platform to create community, share individual experiences, and build a collective identity worth fighting for during the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) protests in Hong Kong in 2019. By examining Save Hong Kong Ourselves, Self-Help First-Aid, 自己香港自己救, 自己受傷自己救 by Yan Yu and 咸濕 (Salty Wet) by T▇▇謝▇ (Tiffany Sia), I discussed the dissemination of counter-hegemonic perspectives and the way that zines are uniquely equipped to provide information while creating connections that embolden and unite individuals. These zines and others that were produced during the recent Hong Kong protests were uniquely positioned to fight for democracy and against censorship because of the role zines play as democratic multiples written by the people and for the people.
Image courtesy of the author.
Prior to 1997, Hong Kong did not have a notable history of large protests, other than the demonstration in 1989 after the Tiananmen Square Massacre. From the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984, announcing that Hong Kong would be returned to Chinese rule in 1997,(1) up until the transfer of power actually occurred, the threat of monumental change intensified for Hongkongers, exponentially. Although many people living in Hong Kong are ethnically Chinese, the history of Hong Kong followed a path that diverged greatly from the mainland, making the prospect of reunification a tense subject when considering the disparities in the collective identities of Hong Kong and mainland China. I argued that the impending countdown created a pressure cooker environment, leading Hong Kong to solidify a more definite identity for itself and its people in that interim. When the incident at Tiananmen Square happened in Beijing in 1989, the act of both protesting and specifically supporting pro-democracy movements naturally took root in the DNA of Hong Kong.
It is then no surprise that this foundational aspect of Hong Kong’s identity featured so prominently in the citizens’ reactions when faced with the Extradition Law Amendment Bill in 2019. By that time, the territory was no stranger to protesting, proving that the collective identity of Hong Kong was strong and thriving. The most prominent protest prior to 2019 was the Umbrella Movement in 2014. It was during this 79-day period that political zines started to play a considerable role in Hong Kong, further shaping the collective identity of the citizens. Many makers chose to create zines in tandem with this major movement as a way to draw on the rich global history of zines being used for activism and expressing dissent, particularly in fights for women’s rights and LGBTQIA+ rights.(2)
One of the most notable differences with the Anti-ELAB movement when compared to earlier protests was the immediate and continual dedication to decentralizing the movement. The phrases “no central stage” and “be water” became paramount, (3) encouraging participants to have autonomy and allowing for more flexibility to respond to the situations they were met with. By creating an environment where citizens felt like any form of involvement was helpful to the collective, the production of communications, publications and artworks took shape through posters, photographs, drawings, infographics, and zines that were distributed both tangibly and online. Tong Kin-long, a scholar of Hong Kong zine history, contextualized the importance of zines taking on topics of protest and identity when he stated, “zines are beyond a resistive text that challenges mainstream narratives. They are also an important tool for artists to communicate a version of the self to cope with the trauma of state violence.”(4)
Image courtesy of the author.
It is that idea of claiming stake in a collective identity and actively asserting aspects of that identity for the good of the collective that has been on my mind over the past few weeks. I have heard a lot of talk (primarily from privileged white people) of leaving the U.S. because of the upsetting election results and it is my opposition to that mentality that has most reminded me of the Anti-ELAB protests because if those protests show us anything, I hope that it is how important every person’s actions are. Wanting to separate your identity from your demographic and, instead, be seen as “one of the good ones” does not exempt you from being part of that collective, so instead of distancing yourself, (speaking to myself and other white people) I hope you find ways to shift the collective identity. I hope we can all find ways to fight for democracy, kindness, and community; in smaller ways like creating zines, and in larger ways like getting involved in community organizing.
Works Cited:
- Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minnesota: the University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 3.
- Adela C. Licona, Zines in Third Space: Radical Cooperation and Borderlands Rhetoric. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), 2.
- Nam Kiu Tsing, Hongkongers’ Fight for Freedom: Voices from the 2019 Anti-extradition Movement (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2023), 32.
- Tong Kin-long, “Overcoming Fear: The Representation of State Violence in Hong Kong’s Protest Zines during the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement,” in Violence in Art: Essays in Aesthetics and Philosophy, ed. Darren M. Slade, (Chicago: Inara Publishing, 2022), 3.
Beth Sheehan is an artist currently living in Tuscaloosa, AL. She teaches paper, print, and book workshops around the US and virtually. She co-authored the book Bookforms. Sheehan has also worked as a professional printer at Durham Press and Harlan and Weaver and was the Bindery Manager at Small Editions.
