May 18, 2016
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Protesters in Hong Kong installing the ‘‘Umbrella Man’’ sculpture during a demonstration in October 2014.
Adam Ferguson for The New York Times
HONG KONG — For the past year, nearly 400 objects and more than a thousand posters have been crammed into a 400-square-foot office space here — artistic remnants of the Umbrella Movement, the pro-democracy protests that shook Hong Kong for more than two months in 2014.
During those weeks, thoroughfares turned into colorful and immersive public art exhibitions, as protest sites bloomed with sculptures, installations, banners and other emblems of dissent.
The question now is, what’s to become of it all?
After the protests ended quietly in December 2014, groups like the Umbrella Movement Visual Archives and Research Collective took in many of the works. The collective manages the storage space in Kowloon, across the harbor from Hong Kong Island, where some of the most violent demonstrations occurred.
Among the works sheathed in clear plastic wrap or tied up in industrial-size black trash bags are a “Bridge of Democracy” staircase and a giant yellow banner bearing the characters for “I want genuine universal suffrage.”
“In the first few months, we were ambitious,” Sampson Wong, a lecturer at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts and a co-founder of the collective, said. “We thought civil society could keep and maintain the archive, but now the atmosphere is changing. People are trying to persuade us to send the objects to a museum.”
The work has raised a tangle of ethical and logistical issues associated with what has been called “activist art and design.”
“It’s a very new area, dealing with this kind of material,” said Gavin Grindon, director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at the University of Essex in Britain and co-curator of a 2014 show, “Disobedient Objects,” at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. “Protest objects are particularly tricky because they are part of unfinished debates, and the objects still live in that sense. The challenge is to find a way to present them on their own terms.”
The collective’s efforts differ from other, similar attempts to archive ephemera from spontaneous movements. In Paris, after the terrorist attacks in 2015, and in New York City, after the Sept. 11 strikes, archivists gathered materials from makeshift public memorials, with the intent of making the items available to historians and sociologists.
In Hong Kong, the goal is not only to preserve the objects but also to display them in a way that can revive the movement’s spirit.
One of the most difficult issues for the collective has been the question of ownership. Mr. Wong estimates that the creators of only half the 400 or so objects have been identified. Not having specific individuals or authorities on the movement to consult, he said, has made the archive’s role as a “temporary protector” of the objects all the harder.
Mr. Grindon and Mr. Wong took part in a workshop about these issues at Hong Kong Polytechnic University in March.
“There’s been so much weight placed on this issue, because an entire generation of young people associates these objects with their political awakening,” said Tina Pang, curator of Hong Kong visual culture for M+, the ambitious new museum going up in Kowloon that organized the seminar.
“But there are considerations that are very specific to this body of material,” she said. “Most of these things were made to be used and not to have a life span beyond their use in the demonstration.”
The ideal solution, Mr. Wong said, would be a small people’s history museum in the city, where the archive could be stored and displayed. But raising money for such a project has proved difficult. Currently, he pays about $1,000 a month out of his own pocket to rent the storage space.
So he and his associates are weighing other options. Some have called for the objects to be collected by a local museum like M+, which is actively building a collection. Others have rejected the idea, arguing that the objects — many of which contain antigovernment messages — were never intended to be part of an institution, much less one like M+, which is funded by the government.
A number of prominent museums, like the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Victoria and Albert in London have collected protest movement art.
M+ has already said that it plans to acquire items from the Umbrella Movement. The next step is to decide how to do that and what to focus on.
“You can collect a lot of material, but if it sits in a storeroom somewhere because you didn’t pick the right things to display, it’s almost like you are making it mute,” Ms. Pang said.
Would the museum consider collecting “Umbrella Man,” the 12-foot wooden figure holding a yellow umbrella that for many became the image of the protests?
“We’re still debating whether the “Umbrella Man” fits into the collection,” Aric Chen, curator of design and architecture at M+, said of the sculpture, which its creator is said to have taken home. “There’s no doubt that it was a prominent piece in the protests. But we are not a history museum.”
In any case, Mr. Wong said that he and his team had become especially attuned to the public mood.
“If there was a museum that had a lot of public trust, this would be much easier,” he said. “It’s the whole environment in Hong Kong right now. No one trusts you if you are somehow related to the government.”
