Phantom Sounds, Haunting Images

ABSTRACT

Powerful, imaginative, and long-lasting, the half-year mobilisation and its iconography are hard to forget, and the ongoing political crackdown keeps our memory alive with constant republications of photographs and video clips of the events. Since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and the proclamation of the National Security Law (NSL) on 30 June 2020, protests have, however, almost disappeared from Hong Kong's public spaces. [...]many films, books, and artworks have vanished from screening venues, shops, and libraries. Soon after the end of the movement, two anonymous books documented these ephemeral displays challenging authorities and urban order (Abaddon 2020;Guardian of Hong Kong 2020). [...]in October 2021, the Film Censorship Ordinance was amended to align with the NSL (Ho 2021b).