JTF (just the facts): Published in 2024 by Zen Foto Gallery (here). Softcover, 293 x 225 mm, 232 pages, with 108 black-and-white reproductions. Includes excerpts (in English/Chinese) from previous photobooks by the artist. In an edition of 1000 copies. (Cover and spread shots below.)
This photobook won the Historical Book Award from the Arles Book Awards/Les Rencontres d’Arles in 2024.
Comments/Context: Once in a while, a photobook arrives on my desk that connects to my own life in an unexpectedly powerful way. The expanded re-issue of Kan Tai Wong’s ’89 Tiananmen is just such a book, for reasons that longtime readers here might find entirely unexpected.
In the summer of 1989, I was actually living in Hong Kong. My family had moved to the British colony in 1987 (the summer before my senior year in high school), following my father’s job, and in the end of May of 1989, I had just returned from my second year in college back in the United States, starting a summer job as a junior copywriter in a small advertising agency in the Wan Chai neighborhood of the city. Most of the copy the agency churned out was written in Chinese for Chinese language newspapers and magazines, but in a few cases, the campaigns stretched across to the local English language publications, so my job was mostly to take the loosely translated Chinese to English copy someone else had written and clean it up.
The student-led pro-democracy protests up in Beijing had actually begun back in April, simmering along through the spring in the form of increasingly large demonstrations and hunger strikes, held in and around the massive Tiananmen Square in the center of Beijing. As the numbers camped out in the square grew, the tension between the government and protestors ratcheted up, leading to the declaration of martial law in late May. I had only been back home and on the job for a few days when there was a huge concert held in solidarity with the student protestors at the Happy Valley Racecourse in Hong Kong; two or three hundred thousand people packed into the infield of the racetrack to listen. I absolutely remember how exciting that concert was; I didn’t go, but many Hong Kong singers and celebrities performed and everyone at work was talking about it. The next day, there was an even larger march through streets of the city, which pulled the central area of the metropolis into a complete standstill. By some measures, more than a million people joined the processions. To this day, it is the single most astonishingly huge crowd I have ever witnessed (in person, and later on the TV news), and its strong sense of defiant optimism and positive energy for change remains seared in my brain.
The situation in Beijing reached a boiling point just a few days later, when the negotiations between the two sides finally broke down, and the Chinese government decided to reassert its authority and clear the square. The tanks rolled in on June 4th and it was a bloody mess, with demonstrators trying to block the soldiers. Hundreds, if not thousands, were killed and wounded (the numbers remain murky), and the square was indeed cleared. Back in Hong Kong, I vividly remember the numbing despair of that news, dark disillusionment at the ultimate exertion of state power mixing with a deep grim outrage that student-led pro-democracy forces had been so harshly suppressed. And for Hong Kong people, it was a depressingly ominous sign that the freedoms that had been collectively celebrated so forcefully just a few days earlier could turn out to be so fragile.
Kan Tai Wong is a Hong Kong-born photojournalist, who was originally up in Beijing in the spring of 1989 to cover a sports competition. But after noticing the protests that were starting to form in Tiananmen Square, he took some initial pictures, and soon returned as the student hunger strikes started to gain momentum, ultimately living with the students for weeks at a time and remaining on the scene through the bloody clash in June. His photographs of the burgeoning democracy movement were made from the inside, embedded in the lives of those actually protesting rather than seen from afar. It is this insider vantage point that still feels so fresh and energizing, even though many decades have now passed since the historic events of that spring.
Wong originally published a selection of his images from the protests (a total of 63 black-and-white pictures) in the initial version of ’89 Tiananmen, which was released in the summer of 1990. In the years that followed, he published various other photobooks of his images from Beijing, eventually expanding the edit to include 102 images from those momentous days (plus 6 from a few years later). This new edition preserves that larger edit of photographs, but in a re-imagined design.
The single most important decision in this new version of ’89 Tiananmen is its increase in scale. It’s a larger book than any of its predecessors, and has been boldly constructed in such a way that the horizontally-oriented images are printed full bleed across entire spreads, while the vertically-oriented images (of which there are far fewer) are placed on the right sides of the spreads, matched by large buffers of white space. The effect is brash and enveloping, pulling us deeper into the action in the images than earlier more restrained and formal presentations offered. The front cover features a student peeking out from a flap in a tent (with the photobook’s title rotated along the spine in all capitals), while the back captures a crowd of onlookers perched on a statue of Red Army soldiers found at Mao’s mausoleum in the square (with the artist’s name and publisher name rotated along the spine in the other direction). The interplay of the two photographs is smart, with plenty of looking, watching, and being seen.
What Wong’s photobook does so well (and does with enduring fidelity even decades later) is to put a face on the abstraction of a political movement; he shows us individuals advocating for (and demanding) democratic rights, and makes their struggles intimate and human rather than conceptual. We see students carrying banners, wearing headbands, marching with linked arms, making speeches into megaphones, carrying hand painted banners, drinking water, sitting patiently, and even playing the accordion. Now and again, Wong steps back to show us seas of heads and the impressive scale of the crowds, but more often he gets in close, introducing us to single people, whose faces represent the contagious optimism and determination of youth. This is true not just for the more famous organizers and leaders of the protests, but for those farther from the action but equally hopeful and committed; indeed, Wong even captures the faces of the police officers and soldiers brought in to control the crowds, reminding us that the faces on both sides were remarkably similar.
Photographically, Wong consistently finds ways to visually pull the urgency out of the surrounding crowd. Sometimes this comes in the form of the movement of a march or the fluttering of a flag or banner; in other cases, he centers in on gestures, interactions, and expressions that capture the shifting emotions of the situation. In the days that pass in the page turns, there is elation, weariness, anger, camaraderie, anguish, intensity, patience, and resilience in seemingly equal measure, with blowing wind, spring rain, and overnight cold further testing the will of the demonstrators. Students sleep under quilts, rest on top of buses, shelter under plastic ponchos and umbrellas, and shield themselves from the sun with hats and banners, braving the elements for weeks at a a time. Seen in sequence, Wong’s images resonate with a sense of community, of shared resolve, and of supportive togetherness, even when the faces turn to scowls and the shouts turn more aggressive.
Near the end of the photobook, after a forbiddingly darkened view of the square’s entrance gate, an entirely black spread signals the crackdown to come, and a pair of images documents the bleakness of the resulting reality. In one photograph, broken bodies and bicycles are strewn across a multi lane roadway, with a few stragglers still fleeing or sheltering. And in the image that follows, the tanks have rolled in and taken control of the situation, with crowds of soldiers turned into crouching silhouettes in the foggy rain.
Even with that bitter ending, ’89 Tiananmen feels stubbornly hopeful, the spirit of the protestors living on well beyond the clearing of the square and the toppling of the revolutionary statue. Wong’s photobook deservedly belongs among the landmarks of global protest photography, and this handsome new re-issue should help to widen its audience beyond that of its initial releases. And for myself, as one who glancingly felt the tides of change in person, Wong’s images of the students still feel resoundingly and inspirationally alive. While the democratic instincts of the people of Hong Kong (and the mainland) have been increasingly squelched of late, books like this one provide a powerful reminder of the long history of struggle that refuses to be erased.
Collector’s POV: Kan Tai Wong does not appear to have consistent gallery representation at this time, although the photographer does have a connection to Zen Foto Gallery through this photobook and its publishing activities. With no direct artist site available, interested collectors should likely follow up directly with the publisher.
