page_title: Lennon Wall (Hong Kong)
section_title: Events
hierarchical_section_title: Lennon Wall (Hong Kong) / History / 2019 anti-extradition bill protests / Events
context_page_description: Lennon Wall, in the Hong Kong context, originally referred to the mosaic wall created during the Umbrella Movement, located at Central Government Complex, Harcourt Road, Admiralty. The wall is one of the major artworks of the Umbrella Movement as a collective artistic work of spontaneous free expression, demanding democracy in the elections of the territory's top leaders.
  It was a space of encouragement and solidarity, full of colourful Post-It notes with messages advocating for freedom, democracy and universal suffrage. Post types included epigrams, lyrics, poems, foreign words and hand-drawn graphics. During the 2014 Umbrella Movement protests, there were coordinated preservation efforts to digitally document the wall and related protest art.
  After over two months of occupy actions by democracy activists, most of the artworks were removed from original positions prior to police clearance operations. Many protesters and citizens have tried to re-create some of the artworks, especially the Hong Kong Lennon Wall.
  During the 2019–20 Hong Kong protests, new Lennon Walls appeared in numerous locations across the territory, typically near transport interchanges.
context_section_description: At midnight on 9 July, more than 200 police officers equipped with shields and helmets stormed into the Tai Po subway that hosted the popular Tai Po Lennon Walls. Police photographed and removed several pieces of paper that allegedly contained the personal information of an officer who, while on duty on 8 July, challenged a peaceful protester to "remember me, and have a fight with me."
  Several Lennon Walls around Hong Kong have been reportedly vandalised within the first few days of being set up. To prevent vandalism, the Mong Kok Lennon Wall is situated at a private property with warning messages to ward off vandals.
  On 10 July hundreds of people gathered near the Lennon Wall by the Yau Tong MTR station in Kowloon, after word spread that local residents, suspected of being off-duty policemen from the nearby Yau Mei Court, were threatening pro-democracy youth who were tidying up the wall. Police later arrived, and the conflict persisted for several hours; a handful of arrests were made by the end of the night, including the arrests of two retired police officers for assaulting democracy activists. On the next day, a pro-Beijing middle-aged man was arrested for physically assaulting two victims, one of which refused to defend himself or retaliate, when he attempted to tear the sticky notes from a Lennon Wall near Kowloon Bay.
caption: Lennon Wall Flag, a flag proposed as an alternative to the black bauhinia flower flag