Aug 30: Talk and Exhibition – The Road to 1911

Pulitzer prize winning photo-journalist and former foreign correspondent Liu Heung Shing will give a talk on Tuesday, 30 August to mark the centennial anniversary of the 1911 Revolution in China.

The talk coincides with the opening of a five week exhibition, The Road to 1911: A Visual History, which will feature 86 photos brought together for the first time from collections worldwide.

Liu Heung Shing

The photographs, which date from the 1860s to the early 1920s and were gathered by Liu, provide an insight into the origins of modern China, in which Hong Kong played a key role.

They illustrate the social conditions and attitudes of the era, the atmosphere inside the imperial court in the dying days of the Qing Dynasty, the lives of the mighty and the poor and various events that helped shape the transition of China from an empire to a republic.

He will share his experiences of compiling this visual history of the period from the Second Opium War of 1860 to the end of the Warlord Era in 1930 and give the narrative a new context against the rise of contemporary China today, when the sensitive topic of nationalism is so easily misguided and misunderstood.

Hong Kong-born Liu has had a journalistic career that’s spanned several decades, working for the Associated Press (AP) in Beijing, Los Angeles, Moscow and New Delhi.

Liu was named Best Photographer by the Associated Press Managing Editors and was awarded Picture of the Year by the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri for recording the turmoil in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

In 1992, he shared a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Now living and working in Beijing, Liu has co-authored Shanghai, A History in Photographs 1842 to Today and edited China: Portrait of a Country, an epic visual history of the sixty years of the People’s Republic.

The exhibition is jointly presented by the JMSC and the University Museum and Art Gallery, in collaboration with the Beijing World Art Museum. It is sponsored by HKU Culture and Humanities Fund. The exhibition is guest curated by Karen Smith, a British critic and curator who lives in Beijing.

It will be held at the University Museum and Art Gallery, 90 Bonham Road, Hong Kong from August 30 to Oct 4. Opening times are Monday to Saturday from 9.30 am–6.00 pm and Sunday from 1.00–6.00 pm. It will be closed on university and public holidays.

In addition to this, Shing will give a lunchtime talk about the exhibition in English at lunchtime at the Asia Society on Tuesday, August 30.

Public Talk — The Power of Images and the Road to 1911 (in Putonghua)
Date: Tuesday, August 30
Time: 6pm – 7:30pm
Venue: Rayson Theatre, HKU

Enquiries: Velentina Ma – e-mail: velentinam@hku.hk / tel: 2219-4012