A new exhibition in the Australian Centre on China in the World at The Australian National University (ANU) offers a rare insight into the dynamic ways Taiwanese photographers navigated the end of martial law in 1987. An image by Hsieh San-Tai shows masked protestors demanding minority language rights in 1989, while another by Chien Yun-Ping, simply titled Love, shows a
About this Event Abridge began with a series of interviews with migrants to Hong Kong from southern China, which led Wei Leng Tay to revisit a body of photographs she made while living and working in Hong Kong from 1999 to 2015. In this conversation, Australian-Hong Kong artist John Young AM joins Wei Leng to discuss how their practices confront history, memory, identity and displacement. John Young’s series 1967Dispersion (2008), based on the circumstances prompting the artist’s migration from Hong Kong to Australia in 1967, marked the first of Young’s History Projects (2007-2019), which have explored the imaging of historical trauma and transcultural solidarity as a form of ethical and social practice. For both artists, Hong Kong has been a site of personal experience yet also a catalyst for exploring such complex issues more globally, and from the present.