For many years, and culminating most recently in 2019, Hong Kong witnessed a series of protest activities which mobilized millions of participants in total, over weeks of marches and “parades.” Originally begun to protest a controversial proposed extradition law favoring the interests of Beijing over the civil liberties assumed by many Hong Kong residents to be enshrined in China’s “one country, two systems” promise to Great Britain during the 1997 handover, the protests now bring into question existential issues confronting Hong Kong in both the short and long term: Can it remain an autonomous city-state, or will it become even more tightly integrated into the legal and political systems of mainland China, perhaps against its will?

Almond Chu’s hauntingly prophetic images give rise to a futuristic vision of a mass-controlled and mass-oriented political order. It is a world in which anonymity is the only protection of the citizen from surveillance, even as this anonymity is steadily stripped away by artificial intelligence programs scouring petabytes and exabtyes and zettabytes and yottabytes of data, stored in ever-expanding data warehouses around the world, in both government and private hands. Who is doing this watching, and why, are questions not currently well-answered, or well-supervised.

As you peruse the images in Parade, you should be reminded that one of the world’s most iconic photographs, Jeff Widener’s “Tank Man at Tiananmen Square, June 5 1989,” is almost unknown in mainland China, due to heavy state censorship. It is precisely the danger posed to totalitarian states by such photos as these which makes it essential to widely distribute them now, while we still have the freedom to do so. May Almond Chu’s warnings of these possible futures help us avert them.

Purchasers are eligible to receive a complimentary limited edition 8x10 inch print of "Curious Police" (cover photo) dated, signed and numbered by Almond Chu. Contact AVGI for details.