ABSTRACT
The leaderless people’s movement—Hong Kong Protests—captured the world’s attention in 2019 when over one million marchers gathered to protest the Beijing-backed Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB 返送中) proposal. Given China’s brand of authoritarian rule, it has no intention of answering the protesters’ demands. This chapter argues that the expression of design activism by dissidents, responses of social and political discontents, could be read as a suffering of traumatic experience. Its protest graphic design works could be analyzed with concepts of displacements where protesters dislocating their distressed psychological feelings into powerful visual communication calls for supporters in the world. By investigating the unintentional displacement strategy and the context of three key global advertising and social media campaigns connected to the Protests in 2019: “Stand with Hong Kong,” “Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong,” and “Hong Kong’s Today; The World’s Tomorrow,” this study wishes to contribute the understanding of concepts of displacement and design activism.
