May 19, 2016
BEIJING — For more than a minute on Tuesday night, nine-digit numbers were displayed across the facade of Hong Kong’s tallest skyscraper, the International Commerce Center. Towering above Victoria Harbor, the glowing white digits blinked against the night sky: 979,012,493… 979,012,492… 979,012,491…
The seemingly innocuous numbers contained a subversive statement. The animation is a countdown of the seconds until when the “one country, two systems” framework — a guarantee that Hong Kong, a former British colony, would keep its civil liberties and a high degree of autonomy for 50 years after its return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 — is set to expire.
“We hope to deliver this work to illustrate the biggest anxiety of the Hong Kong people,” Sampson Wong, who created the animation with the artist Jason Lam, said before the lights first went up.
The artists planned the display to coincide with a three-day visit to Hong Kong by Zhang Dejiang, a member of China’s governing Politburo Standing Committee, which began on Tuesday. Mr. Zhang is the highest-ranking official from mainland China to visit Hong Kong since the pro-democracy demonstrations in 2014 known as the Umbrella Movement.
The city has gone to great lengths to contain protests during Mr. Zhang’s visit, but pro-democracy messages have slipped through. At least seven members of the League of Social Democrats party were arrested on Tuesday in connection with at least two banners appearing in public — one on a hillside, the other along the route taken by Mr. Zhang’s motorcade — reading “I Want Genuine Universal Suffrage” and “End Chinese Communist Party Dictatorship.”
“Due to the high level of security, there’s almost no channel for the Hong Kong people to voice and protest,” Mr. Wong said.
It remained to be seen how the local authorities would react to such a message, however subtle, being shown on the city’s tallest building.
Mr. Wong said he and Mr. Lam had been able to get the countdown project approved by submitting it as part of a longer, mostly apolitical, digital animation. That nine-minute work, titled “Our 60-Second Friendship Begins Now,” was commissioned by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council to be displayed on the International Commerce Center, known as the I.C.C., as part of a broader public media-art exhibition. Like many other buildings in the city skyline, the I.C.C. lights up with animated displays at night.
“Most of the animations shown on the I.C.C. are ad-like, meaningless videos,” Mr. Wong said. “We wanted to show something relevant to the social situation of Hong Kong.”
The work is scheduled to be shown on the facade of the I.C.C. every night until June 22. But Mr. Wong said he feared it would be canceled once the meaning of the countdown became widely known.
The countdown echoes one that was conducted across China in the weeks leading up to July 1, 1997, the day of Hong Kong’s handover. The numbers were called out loud in schools, on television and in radio broadcasts, and an electronic clock displaying the days, and even seconds, was erected in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. (The Hong Kong animation was originally intended to indicate the seconds until July 1, 2047, but it is off by several weeks because of technical problems.)
Since the 2014 protests, which called for full public participation in elections for Hong Kong’s leader, fizzled out without concessions from Beijing or the local government, many young activists have turned to 2047 as a focal point for their democratic aspirations. Some are even calling for a local referendum on whether Hong Kong should become independent from China at that time.
