American artist Hank Willis Thomas found himself at the center of a plagiarism fracas this September, when one of his works on view at Goodman Gallery’s booth at the FNB Joburg Art Fair was flagged for its appropriation of a 1990 photograph by Graeme Williams. After an incensed Williams reached out to the gallery, Thomas removed the work, seemingly not out of remorse but exasperation, asking, in an article for Artnet News: “At what point can someone else begin to wrestle with these images and issues in a different way… Who has the right to represent the historic document of a public event and in what way?”

These very questions are at the heart of “My Life is Ours,” Thomas’ first solo show at Ben Brown Fine Arts’ Hong Kong outpost. Here, Thomas premiered a new set of photo works using a technique in which an image, usually of a protest, is printed on retroreflective vinyl, with the full image only revealed through a flash of bright light—referencing, literally, the pivotal moment when an image is shot and, metaphorically, the sparked conflict that it documents. In an earlier example of Thomas’s use of this material, Intentionally Left Blanc (2012), we see a huddle of African-Americans, marching in what resembles a Civil Rights-era protest. The image is taken at an angle so that only their faces and upper bodies are depicted. When a beam of light is shone on the surface, exposing its contents, we see that Thomas has deliberately erased the faces of some of the protesters, rendering them in flat white shapes, as a commentary on America’s history of racial violence and segregation. 

In “My Life is Ours,” Thomas has turned his focus on photographs of Chinese and Chinese-diaspora uprisings, primarily the student-led 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, in which thousands of people railing against state corruption and demanding transparency were killed by the People’s Liberation Army, and the 2014 Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, the culmination of already-existing discontent sparked by the release of a white paper that explained the city’s chief-executive electoral process as largely under the control of China’s central government. At first glance, the show seems potentially problematic. While US-specific topics of racism and conflict have fueled the entirety of Thomas’ career, one wonders why the artist has chosen to address a topic, and history, that doesn’t necessarily correlate to his lived experience or personal history.

The works deserve a second glance, at the least to engage in the gimmicky appeal of “revealing” the scenes, which are doubly concealed under Thomas’ painterly swipes and dashes. These marks serve almost as beautifying edits, such as Basked in Light (White and Black on White) (2018), where clouds of toxic mace, administered by the Hong Kong Police Force to control crowds at the Umbrella Movement, are re-mastered, via the painted marks, as a waterfall of sunlight. According to the press release, the artist has culled these particular images by attempting to “illuminate parallels between the two historic events that occurred 25 years apart.” On a very basic, visual level, the Tiananmen Square protests and the Umbrella Movement seem similar. Both featured disenfranchised, baby-faced youths looking to enact political change, as seen in My Life is Ours (2018), of the mass gathering in Beijing with the Forbidden City in the background, and "Hands up! Don't Shoot!" (Red on Blue, Hong Kong) (2018), an image of a walking crowd of student protestors outside of the Hong Kong government headquarters. However, while both were struggles for democracy, the reform-era mentality of Beijing in 1989 and the rage over failed postcolonial promises for Hong Kong resulted in entirely different protests, with entirely different consequences. Even more unrelated are the 1967 pro-Chinese Communist Party riots of Hong Kong and New York’s Chinatown anti-oppression march in 1975, both of which were also depicted in the exhibition. This discombobulating assortment of imagery causes Thomas’ efforts to connect them to appear more superficial than illuminating.

An inherent struggle occurs when looking at these images. Try as one might to keep an open mind about Thomas’ use of them and his good intentions, his unprovoked probing of such a wide range of delicate narratives is overwhelmingly distracting, especially in Hong Kong, where some already feel trapped by the impending loss of autonomy come 2047, when mainland China will officially regain full administrative control over the city. In this sobering context, one is reminded of literary theorist Roland Barthes’ meditations on photography and grief, Camera Lucida (1980), in which he describes a “photograph as a motionless image . . . the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not emerge, do not leave. They are anesthetized and fastened down.” Thus the figures in these images, many of whom might still be alive, and fighting to move or change, are in a state of constant suppression in these works: first by the freezing of events in the photograph itself, and then again in Thomas’ appropriations, the retroreflective treatment an obscuring, in this particular case, of the people beneath the surface. 

Ysabelle Cheung is ArtAsiaPacific’s managing editor.

Hank Willis Thomas’ “My Life is Ours” is on view at Ben Brown Fine Arts, Hong Kong, until October 27, 2018.

• Hong Kong
• USA