Media

Public Address: The Power of Images and The Road to 1911

24 Aug 2011

 

The Power of Images and The Road to 1911

Speaker: Liu Heung Shing
Date: Tuesday, 30 August 2011
Time: 6:00 to 7:30 pm
Venue: Rayson Huang Theatre, HKU
Language: Putonghua
Free admission, all are welcome

Liu Heung Shing, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist and former foreign correspondent, 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.  The photos were collected by Liu.

The photographs, which run from the Second Opium War in 1860 to the end of the Warlord Era in the early 1920s, 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.

Liu will recount his experiences in compiling this visual history.

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Hong Kong-born Liu Heung Shing's journalistic career has spanned several decades. Working for the Associated Press, he was based in Beijing, Los Angeles, Moscow and New Delhi.

He 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 60 years of the People's Republic.

The Road to 1911 exhibition is jointly presented by Hong Kong University's Journalism and Media Studies Centre and the University Museum and Art Gallery, in collaboration with the Beijing World Art Museum. It is sponsored by the HKU Culture and Humanities Fund. The exhibition will be on display at the University Museum and Art Gallery, 90 Bonham Road, from August 30 to October 4.

For media enquiries, please contact Ms Velentina Ma, Journalism and Media Studies Centre. Tel: 2219-4012 / 9123-0252; email: velentinam@hku.hk .