When four seconds challenge a system: art intervention in Hong Kong

On the evening of April 1, 2025, Chinese-Australian “dissident” artist Badiucao announced via Instagram that his face—and a silent message—had briefly appeared on two large LED billboards in Mong Kok, Hong Kong. The four-second clip, quietly urging viewers to “take part in revolution,” was removed less than 24 hours later.

Titled Here and Now, the video showed Badiucao’s face in monochrome, silently mouthing a quote from Mao Zedong’s 1937 essay “On Practice”: “You must take part in revolution.” The work was submitted under the pseudonym “Andy Chou” to the Milan-based Art Innovation Gallery and selected for its public art project “Luminance”, a three-minute rotating video reel screened hourly in Hong Kong’s busiest commercial zones from March 28 to April 3. Displayed on LED screens at 33A Argyle Street and 6–12 Sai Yeung Choi South Street in Mong Kok, the clip, camouflaged among commercial content, was captured by street observers before its removal on April 2.

In an interview with Enid Tsui from the South China Morning Post, Professor Paul Gladston, UNSW Judith Neilson Chair of Contemporary Art, discussed the broader implications of Badiucao's work in Hong Kong. He pointed out that both Hong Kong and mainland Chinese artists often have to be ambiguous and avoid directly addressing their critical targets. He explained: “All art lives under localised restrictions which ultimately require indirectness and ambiguity.” Read Enid's article here.

Professor Gladston’s research has long examined visual culture in relation to struggles and conflicts at the borders of Hong Kong, the South China Sea, and Taiwan, as well as within the PRC. His edited book Visual Culture Wars at the Borders of Contemporary China (Springer, 2021) critically investigates visual culture as a means of representing, contributing to and/or intervening with discursive struggles and territorial conflicts currently taking place at and across the outward-facing and internal borders of the People’s Republic of China. 

Relevant research and further reading: 

• Paul Gladston, Beccy Kennedy-Schtyk and Ming Turner eds. (2021), Visual Culture Wars at the Borders of Contemporary China: Art, Design, Film, New Media and the Prospects of “Post-West” Contemporaneity, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Enid Tsui (April 8, 2025), “Chinese dissident artist’s video shown on Hong Kong billboards; gallery says it was conned.” South China Morning Post. 

Image credit: South China Morning Post