# Hong Kong Protest Art (Umbrella Movement to the 2019–20 Protests)

> The graphics of Hong Kong's democracy protests, from the 2014 Umbrella Movement to the national security law of 2020, in two linked media. On Lennon Walls passers-by covered stairways, footbridges and underpasses with thousands of hand-written Post-it notes. Anonymous posters, voted on in the LIHKG forum and sent by Telegram and AirDrop, drew helmeted, gas-masked protesters in an anime manner, recast film posters, MTR signs and 'elder memes', and shared emblems instead of a logo: the umbrella, the black bauhinia, the yellow helmet.

- Period: 2014–2020
- Where: East Asia
- Origin: Hong Kong. During the Umbrella Movement's 79-day occupation of Admiralty, Mong Kok and Causeway Bay (28 September to 15 December 2014), two social workers bought Post-it notes on 1 October 2014 and invited people to write why they were staying on the curved staircase outside the Central Government Offices on Harcourt Road, Admiralty. The first note read 'Why Are We Here?', more than ten thousand followed, and the wall was named after the Lennon Wall in Prague. In the same months demonstrators hung banners on Lion Rock and other peaks, and black umbrellas painted with yellow characters became the movement's sign. When the anti-extradition bill protests began on 9 June 2019 the Admiralty wall was set up again, and walls 'blossomed everywhere' on footbridges, underpasses and stations (a crowd-sourced map counted more than 150). Posters were proposed and voted on in the LIHKG forum, made by an anonymous publicity group (文宣) of roughly 200 to 500 people working under pseudonyms, and spread through Telegram channels, AirDrop and the walls. After the national security law took effect on 30 June 2020, supporters and 'yellow' shops took down notes, posters and flags, and some shops put up blank sticky notes instead.
- Branch: Counterculture
- Also known as: Lennon Wall art, Umbrella Movement art, 2019–20 Hong Kong protest posters, LIHKG protest posters, Anti-extradition bill protest art
- Page: https://stylogeny.com/styles/hong-kong-protest-art/

## Use it with care

This is the work of a living community, much of it made at real legal risk: the government said on 2 July 2020 that 'Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times' has separatist and subversive connotations under the national security law, ten people were arrested the day before for flags, banners and even a phone-case sticker with the slogan, and on 27 July 2021 Tong Ying-kit was convicted of incitement to secession for displaying it on a flag. Never attribute a poster to a named person or expose its pseudonymous makers, and remember that showing these images can still endanger people in Hong Kong. Recurring figures such as the woman injured in the eye on 11 August 2019 and Marco Leung, who died in a yellow raincoat on 15 June 2019, are real people, not edgy protest styling; do not put the slogan, the emblems or the anime protester on products or campaigns, and avoid the 'Chinazi' swastika variants, which carry a Nazi symbol. Some Lennon Walls also carried police officers' personal details (at midnight on 9 July 2019 police removed papers said to carry an officer's personal information from the Tai Po tunnel), and both sides used dehumanising names, protesters calling police 'dogs' and police calling protesters 'cockroaches'; never reproduce doxxing or such slurs, and never present a generated image as a work of the movement.

## How it works

- Turn a wall into a forum: hand out square sticky notes in several colours and let anyone write a wish, a lyric, a poem or a small drawing by hand, note beside note, and paste printed posters among them, until stairway, footbridge or underpass is one even, many-coloured field with no focal point; now and then arrange the squares into Chinese characters or a diagram.
- Make the poster for the phone first: a full-bleed picture that reads at thumbnail size in a forum thread, a Telegram channel or an AirDrop pop-up, then printed at home and pasted on the walls; put drafts to a forum vote, answer each day's events at once, and sign nothing with a real name.
- Draw the protesters as anime and manga heroes in full gear (yellow helmet, goggles or eye mask, respirator, black clothes, umbrella), many anonymous figures rather than one leader, and redraw each injury or event in many hands: cartoon, watercolour, Pepe the Frog, fact sheet.
- Speak through borrowed forms: recast a Hollywood film poster, an album cover, a wartime recruitment poster, a Chinese almanac page, an MTR warning sign or Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, keep the original's layout and lettering and change the actors; for older residents, use the loud colours, flowers and dated fonts of elder memes.
- Write slogans by hand: brush the Chinese in vertical columns on banners, road signs and long cloth banners hung from the peak of Lion Rock, set English lines beside them for the world, and coin new characters when the language falls short.
- Build identity from a shared stock of emblems rather than a designed system: the umbrella and the yellow ribbon, the black or wilting bauhinia, the yellow helmet, Pepe and the LIHKG pig, in black and yellow.

## Its design choices

Defining choices make the style, characteristic ones are usual, occasional ones turn up now and then.

### Layout & composition
- [All-over field](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/all-over-field/) (defining)
- [Collage & layering](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/collage-and-layering/) (characteristic)
- [Full bleed](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/full-bleed/) (characteristic)
- [Modular grid](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/modular-grid/) (occasional)

### Space & hierarchy
- [Horror vacui](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/horror-vacui/) (defining)
- [Flat hierarchy](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/flat-hierarchy/) (characteristic)
- [Repetition & rhythm](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/repetition-and-rhythm/) (characteristic)
- [Single focal point](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/single-focal-point/) (characteristic)

### Typography
- [Hand-lettering](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/hand-lettering/) (defining)
- [Brush & pen calligraphy](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/brush-and-pen-calligraphy/) (characteristic)
- [Rotated & vertical setting](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/rotated-and-vertical-setting/) (characteristic)
- [Eclectic mixing](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/eclectic-mixing/) (characteristic)
- [Type as image](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/type-as-image/) (characteristic)
- [All caps](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/all-caps/) (occasional)
- [Experimental & distorted](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/experimental-and-distorted/) (occasional)

### Colour
- [Full polychrome](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/full-polychrome/) (characteristic)
- [Limited spot colours](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/limited-spot-colours/) (characteristic)
- [Dark ground](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/dark-ground/) (characteristic)
- [Flat fields](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/flat-fields/) (characteristic)
- [Fluorescent & neon](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/fluorescent-and-neon/) (occasional)
- [Pastel](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/pastel/) (occasional)
- [Gradients](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/gradients/) (occasional)

### Form & shape
- [Stylised figuration](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/stylised-figuration/) (defining)
- [Pictogram](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/pictogram/) (characteristic)

### Surface & texture
- [Flat](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/flat/) (characteristic)
- [Painterly brushwork](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/painterly-brushwork/) (occasional)

### Ornament
- [Emblems & badges](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/emblems-and-badges/) (characteristic)
- [Floral & vegetal](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/floral-and-vegetal/) (occasional)
- [Folk & sacred symbols](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/folk-and-sacred-symbols/) (occasional)

### Imagery
- [Comic & cartoon](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/comic-and-cartoon/) (defining)
- [Found & vernacular imagery](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/found-and-vernacular-imagery/) (defining)
- [Photomontage](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/photomontage/) (characteristic)
- [Diagram & data](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/diagram-and-data/) (characteristic)
- [Painterly illustration](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/painterly-illustration/) (occasional)

### Medium & production
- [Pen, brush & ink](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/pen-brush-and-ink/) (defining)
- [Web & CSS](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/web-and-css/) (defining)
- [Architecture & signage](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/architecture-and-signage/) (characteristic)
- [Textile & craft](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/textile-and-craft/) (occasional)

### Tone & intent
- [Agitational & persuasive](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/agitational-and-persuasive/) (defining)
- [Communal & popular](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/communal-and-popular/) (defining)
- [Rebellious & subversive](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/rebellious-and-subversive/) (defining)
- [Ironic & self-aware](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/ironic-and-self-aware/) (characteristic)
- [Playful & witty](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/playful-and-witty/) (characteristic)
- [Warm & approachable](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/warm-and-approachable/) (occasional)

Avoids: Authoritative & institutional, Luxurious & glamorous, Calm & contemplative, Generous white space, Gloss & highlights, Chrome & 3D render, Ornament-free

Palette: #111111, #f5c400, #c8102e, #ff8fb8, #74cde8, #f4f4f0

Typefaces: Handwriting in marker and ballpoint on Post-it notes, in Chinese, English and other languages, with epigrams, song lyrics, poems and small drawings, as on the Lennon Walls, Brush-written Chinese slogans in vertical columns on banners, flags, hill banners and road signs, sometimes with invented composite characters such as 黑 joined to 警, MTR station-sign typography, kept intact in parodies such as 'Mind the Thug', The dated, brightly coloured fonts of elder memes (長輩圖), aimed at older residents, White English capitals on black flags, such as 'LIBERATE HONG KONG / REVOLUTION OF OUR TIMES'

Known for: Lennon Wall on the staircase outside the Central Government Offices, Harcourt Road, Admiralty, started on 1 October 2014 by two social workers with the note 'Why Are We Here?'; more than ten thousand notes by December 2014, when most were removed before the clearance; set up again after 9 June 2019; The Lennon Walls of June and July 2019, more than 150 on a crowd-sourced map, among them the 'Lennon Tunnel' near Tai Po Market station and walls in Sha Tin, Tsing Yi, Causeway Bay and Kwun Tong; Banner 'I want real universal suffrage' (我要真普選) hung at the peak of Lion Rock on 23 October 2014 and taken down by the government the next day, followed by the 'demolish one, hang ten' campaign of banners on other peaks and islands; Umbrella Movement protest umbrellas, black umbrellas painted in yellow with Chinese characters reading 'backing up' or 'support', Hong Kong, 2014, Victoria and Albert Museum, London (CD.60-2014 and CD.61-2014); Lady Liberty Hong Kong (香港民主女神像), a crowdfunded statue chosen from nine proposals in an LIHKG vote of about 8,000 users in August 2019 and modelled on a protester whose eye was allegedly ruptured by a police bean-bag round: yellow helmet, eye mask, gas mask, an umbrella in the right hand and a 'Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times' banner in the left; first shown at the Chinese University of Hong Kong on 31 August 2019, carried up Lion Rock in mid-October and toppled and splashed with red paint within a day; 'Mind the Thug', MTR warning signage reworked in the MTR's own typography after the Yuen Long attack of July 2019; Posters recasting Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People with protesters in gear and Michelangelo's Creation of Adam with students in a human chain, and posters laid out like Chinese almanacs (2019); The wilted or bloodied bauhinia, posted on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and worked into Facebook profile pictures in June 2019, and the black bauhinia flag, a black-and-white Hong Kong flag; bloodstained variants were raised in place of the PRC flags outside the Legislative Council when protesters stormed it on 1 July 2019

## Where it comes from, and what it’s close to

- Influenced by: [Story Manga (Postwar Japanese Comics)](https://stylogeny.com/styles/story-manga.md) (1947–present)
- Influenced by: [Internet Ugly & Meme Vernacular](https://stylogeny.com/styles/internet-ugly.md) (2003–present)
- Alike in its design choices: [Chilean Estallido Social Graphics (Revuelta Popular of 2019–20)](https://stylogeny.com/styles/chilean-estallido-graphics.md) (2019–2022), 64% alike
- Alike in its design choices: [Latin American Feminist Protest Graphics (Ni Una Menos and the Green Wave)](https://stylogeny.com/styles/marea-verde-graphics.md) (2015–present), 61% alike
- Alike in its design choices: [Tropicália Graphic Design](https://stylogeny.com/styles/tropicalia-graphics.md) (1964–1975), 60% alike
- Alike in its design choices: [Ultras Graphics (Curva Banners and Tifo)](https://stylogeny.com/styles/ultras-graphics.md) (1968–present), 59% alike
- Alike in its design choices: [Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines (Gırgır to Uykusuz)](https://stylogeny.com/styles/turkish-humour-magazines.md) (1972–2025), 58% alike
- Alike in its design choices: [South African Vernacular Design (Ijusi)](https://stylogeny.com/styles/ijusi-vernacular.md) (1995–present), 56% alike

## Sources

- Wikipedia, 'Art of the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_of_the_2019%E2%80%932020_Hong_Kong_protests)
- Wikipedia, 'Lennon Wall (Hong Kong)' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennon_Wall_(Hong_Kong))
- Wikipedia, 'Umbrella Movement' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umbrella_Movement)
- Wikipedia, 'Lady Liberty Hong Kong' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Liberty_Hong_Kong)
- Wikipedia, 'Social media use in the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_use_in_the_2019%E2%80%932020_Hong_Kong_protests)
- Wikipedia, 'Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberate_Hong_Kong,_revolution_of_our_times)
- Mai Corlin Frederiksen, 'Images of Protest: Hong Kong 2019–2020', FIELD: A Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism, issue 20 (Winter 2022) (https://field-journal.com/?p=5819)
- Victor Mair, 'Vocabulary of Hong Kong protest slogans and new characters', Language Log (1 September 2019) (https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=44272)
- Victoria and Albert Museum, Umbrella Movement protest umbrellas, CD.60-2014 and CD.61-2014 (https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1302040/, https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1316232/)
- Hoover Institution Library & Archives, Hong Kong umbrella revolution collection, 2014 (https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8js9trm/)
- Flags of the World, 'Hong Kong: independence and protest flags' (https://crwflags.com/FOTW/flags/hk}ind.html)
- Wikipedia, 'Black Bauhinia flag' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Bauhinia_flag)
- Chris Bell and Pratik Jakhar, 'Hong Kong protests: Social media users show support', BBC News (13 June 2019) (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-48621964)
- Wikipedia, 'Lion Rock' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_Rock)
- Holmes Chan, 'Political cartoonist Badiucao unveils new Lennon Wall flag for Hong Kong democracy movement', Hong Kong Free Press (10 September 2019) (https://hongkongfp.com/2019/09/10/political-cartoonist-badiucao-unveils-new-lennon-wall-flag-hong-kong-democracy-movement/)
- Hong Kong Free Press, 'Wilting bauhinias and widemouthed tigers: The evolution of Hong Kong's protest posters' (25 July 2019) (https://hongkongfp.com/2019/07/25/wilting-bauhinias-widemouthed-tigers-evolution-hong-kongs-protest-posters/)
- Zen Soo and Phoebe Lai, 'Hong Kong protesters adapt signs, slogans to skirt new law', Associated Press (20 July 2020) (https://abc3340.com/news/nation-world/hong-kong-protesters-adapt-signs-slogans-to-skirt-new-law)

---

From Stylogeny (https://stylogeny.com/), an atlas of graphic-design styles by Van Riel Online Services. How it is made: https://stylogeny.com/about/. Cite as: Stylogeny, “Hong Kong Protest Art (Umbrella Movement to the 2019–20 Protests)”, https://stylogeny.com/styles/hong-kong-protest-art/