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On 28 September, 2014, participants in Hong Kong’s civil disobedience movement, the so-called “umbrella movement,” blocked roads in the city’s financial district in order to bring attention to the issue of universal suffrage. One year later, Karin Weber Gallery presents, The Road, photographer Tse Ming-chong’s first-person account of the movement’s earliest days.

Tse’s photographs allow the viewer to follow along with him that evening, as he freely walks from Central to Causeway Bay on Harcourt Road. Arresting and compelling, these works pull the viewer in, as these scenes present a muted urban landscape frozen with tension. The Road: Photographic Works by Tse Ming-chong is on display 29 September–10 October 2015.

Fresh from the publication of his book, Chronicle – A Hong Kong Diary, which contains a visual journal of Hong Kong over the last quarter century, Tse asks the viewer to ponder what lies ahead for Hong Kong and its people in the aftermath of the “umbrella movement.”

The title of the exhibition, The Road, serves as a fitting metaphor seeped in meaning for the artist. Never short of signs, the road requires of every traveler certain actions and decisions. Tse takes the viewer on a road less traveled; back to a particular date and time when a well-traveled artery through the city stood still and a city held its breath.

Tse Ming-chong, principal lecturer in the Hong Kong Design Institute’s department of communication design and digital media, began his artistic career over 25 years ago with a photograph of Mao Zedong’s portrait at the moment it was removed from Beijing’s Tiananmen gate. It had been splattered with ink during the student-led protests in 1989.

Tse has been documenting the world around him ever since: Hong Kong’s change of sovereignty, its evolution as a metropolitan city in China, and the effects of “One Country, Two Systems” on its inhabitants.  The artist’s works are held in the collections of the Hong Kong Museum of Art, the Hong Kong Heritage Museum and the Hong Kong Film Archive.