Umbrella Uprising: A Visual Documentation of the 2019 Hong Kong Protests

by Jeffrey Choy (Lead Editor), Karen Wong (Editor)

Art has long been regarded as a cultural form within social movements to confront injustice and reshape society. The 2019 Hong Kong social movement has witnessed a proliferation of creative energies during the protests for people to express their social and political concerns.

This publication is an archival project of collecting over 500 artworks related to the social movement in Hong Kong, disclosing the stories of Hong Kong protesters and their emotional struggles behind the news and mass media.

Umbrella Uprising: A Visual Documentation of the 2019 Hong Kong Protests is aimed at international readers who are interested in the development of the Hong Kong social movement and its creativity.

326 pages, Paperback

Published June 30, 2020

About the author

Jeffrey Choy is a writer and artist whose work spans print, video arts, installations, and immersive interactive media, with a strong focus on publication arts, merging book design with critical inquiry into knowledge production, distribution, and decolonisation of copyright and ownership, examines the ideological structures shaping culture and politics. His practice interrogates censorship, propaganda, and populist consciousness, particularly in relation to colonisation and class disparity.

After a decade in graphic and spatial design within the commercial sector and trained in Interior Architecture with 1st honours, Jeffrey’s creative trajectory shifted dramatically after witnessing the political upheaval in his hometown of Hong Kong from afar. This rupture led him to rethink the role of media, language, and visual communication in conditions of state control and cultural resistance. His approach is both philosophical-driven and experimentation-focused, treating play as a necessary response to late capitalist crises and the ideology of infinite growth. Across print, digital media, and performance, he explores how narratives are shaped, censored, and reclaimed, with his publications functioning as both artistic objects and platforms for critical discourse, often extending into participatory and collaborative formats.

Jeffrey has worked alongside institutions and artist-led initiatives including Bow Arts, Battersea Arts Centre, National Theatre Wales, Wales Millennium Centre, Factory International Manchester, Metal Culture, performingborders, Projekt Europa, Whitechapel Gallery, the British Library, Tai Kwun Hong Kong, and more.

He is the co-founder of Hidden Keileon CIC, an artist-led collective working with migrant and queer communities to imagine futures through non-hierarchical collaboration and multidisciplinary, life-affirming cultural projects. His artistic practice is shaped by collective authorship, radical friendships, and the politics of publishing as tools for survival and resistance.

His work invites the curious, the critical, and those seeking spaces for reflection and reimagination.

Reviews

[Izzy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Informative book on protests in Hong Kong.

Recommend: ✅

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The perfect book to read while watching the US election returns.