For my work, I collected photos and written materials from individuals during the protests that took place when I was a student in Hong Kong. As a student from China, I witnessed the movement in Hong Kong as a bystander at that time. I accessed reports from both China and Hong Kong, and I realized that the article and photos are only slices of the event. Photography has always been a way to record events, but it is not an objective depiction since it only tells subjective truth.

In China, the standpoints of publishers were highly controlled by the countries, while there was more freedom for Hong Kong publishers at that time. In this case, when conflicts happened between the police and the public in Hong Kong, journalists from these places staged the events differently. More journalists from China stood for the police and more journalists in Hong Kong stood for the public. In this case, both of their images were telling the truth but turned out to be different, which led to an opposite reaction from the public on social media.

There is nothing like objective truth. To investigate the concept of the “truth” from a specific event, I have collected photos taken by friends, stories they wrote, and the social media posts they posted at that time and tried to find differences between these unofficial materials and official materials from newspapers and websites. I have invited one of them to talk about their own experiences in an audio recording that is shown as a video with only English subtitles, while representing the still photos from official media. By narrating the story in different ways, I would like to show the contrasts between subjective stories.