Open Collections

Wu, Xinran

University of British Columbia

This thesis explores the visual materials produced during the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement in Hong Kong. Focusing on protest ephemera, this thesis examines first the use of internet-based memes, then street art as an extension of the online world, and finally 3D printing technology as a synthesis of these to understand the roll new media played and continues to play in shaping political movements in the contemporary age. I contend that the visual cultures of protest produced in Hong Kong represent an exciting new hybridization of online/offline worlds and art forms. 3D-printed materials are functionally code but can take physical form. Political life has always straddled the public and private, but with the advent and development of contemporary internet cultures, it has also entered our social lives, blurring these boundaries even further. These works are at once situated and placeless, universal and deeply enigmatic, intangible and physical. These contradictions and juxtapositions are what makes the works compelling. Through this exploration in the aesthetic productions in Hong Kong’s 2019 Pro-Democracy Movement, I see a future in understanding how and where internet cultures and life will continue to permeate the physical world. The three examples discussed in this thesis represent models of communal healing and remembrance, and I hope that we might see street art return to Hong Kong when a post COVID-19 era finally arrives. For now, the city’s young continue to share memes and other images online, their humour and politics creating a community for themselves with a pictorial language only they know.

Text

2022-06-03

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/81690

Art History and Theory

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/