“I reviewed the set of black-and-white negatives taken during the 1989 student democracy movement in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square through the white light of the light box, searching for the youthful spirit that was left behind on Chang’an Street,” writes Photojournalist Kan-Tai Wong in a 2010 afterword to the bookazine Mahjong, included in ’89 Tiananmen. “In the presence of these remnants of youth still waiting to be picked up, I cannot help but wonder how they are doing today. After all, it was the most beautiful spark of humanity that had ever appeared in the land of China.”
It has now been 35 years since these events occurred on June 4th, 1989, when the Chinese Government violently put down the student-led democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, the heart of Beijing, by sending armed troops to force the students to leave the square. To this day, it remains unclear how many people were killed. Estimates range from a few hundred to many thousands.
Discussions in China around the Tiananmen Square Massacre are suppressed. Photographs are never shown or seen. Any mentions of the event, even the most innocuous reference to just the date or the numbers that make up the date when written, especially near its anniversary, are regularly scrubbed from the Chinese internet. And for the people born in China afterwards, there is very little awareness of what happened.
But there is a precious record of what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Photographer Kan-Tai Wong was there, with his camera, among the students and activists. Originally containing 63 black and white photographs, ’89 Tiananmen, first published in 1990, remains a powerful visual memory of these troubled weeks in Beijing.
“If we consider the camera as a memory device, then there is no doubt that the 63 black and white images published here capture what I witnessed and thought during the Beijing Democratic Movement in 1989,” writes Wong in the original edition of the book. “As a photographer who was present at such a historic event, I instinctively used the viewfinder to record my own perspectives and emotions about this significant movement. In the beginning I was optimistic that everything I saw was the inevitable progression of society. It was not until after the suppression that I finally realized how meandering and circuitous the long river of history could be.”
The new 2024 edition of ’89 Tiananmen, published by the Zen Photo Gallery in Tokyo, Japan expands on the original printing and includes 102 photographs taken by Wong during the 1989 protests, and 6 taken since. The book also contains several texts written by Wong from previous editions of the book, along with a new text written for this printing.
Kan-Tai Wong was born in Hong Kong in 1957. After joining the Hong Kong Press in the 1970s, he set off on a career as a photojournalist. In the mid 1980s he furthered his passion by studying photography at the Tokyo Institute of Polytechnics, now known as Tokyo Polytechnics University.
Wong had travelled to Beijing to cover a sports competition and had witnessed the protests and began covering them. He returned to his home in Hong Kong for a few days, but hearing that the students had started a hunger strike, he immediately flew back to Beijing. Because Wong was a local photographer who lived with the students for many weeks, rather than like many who reported from the outside, he was able to photograph the students up close, creating intimate photographs of scenes others were not able to get. He remained with the students till the very end.
The power of these photographs still resonates today. Not only because of the historical weight that they carry, but because there is no other record like the one Wong created. As the Chinese government continues to erase the memory of Tiananmen Square, even by suppressing the previously yearly remembrances held in Hong Kong, Kan-Tai Wong’s photographs seem to be even more important to be shared and seen. “While these images from a few decades ago may only capture a fleeting moment of light in the river of time, the yellowing of time can never hide the brilliance of youth.”
’89 Tiananmen is published by the Zen Foto Gallery in Tokyo, Japan. The book can be purchased through the gallery’s website here, though it is not available to be shipped to China, Hong Kong or Macau.
’89 Tiananmen was recently awarded the 2024 Historical Book Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles. A full list of book winners can be found here.
