Info

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.

Karin Weber Gallery presents The Road: Photographic Works by Tse Ming-chong. A veteran photographer, Tse presents the unfolding events of the “umbrella revolution” in ten pairs of photographic images taken on the evening of 30 September, 2014.

“I woke up at 4am and could not go back to sleep,” says Tse.
“So I took a car to Central.”

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.

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.