Review | Poetry, drama, tragedy in images of China and Soviet Union shot by Chinese photojournalist 1980s and ’90s
- Liu Heung Shing, a Pulitzer Prize winner, enjoyed a unique advantage in China as a Chinese person with local insight but the freedom of a foreign correspondent
- The Hong Kong photojournalist captured images both of daily life and big events, from the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown in Beijing to the fall of the Soviet Union
A Life in a Sea of Red: Photojournalism by Liu Heung Shing, by Pi Li, Christopher Phillips, Geoff Raby and Liu Heung Shing, Steidl, 5/5 stars
A Life in a Sea of Red, which will be launched globally this month, is the only book to combine Hong Kong photojournalist Liu Heung Shing’s work from the world’s two communist superpowers, the Soviet Union and China.
Together, these states once housed a quarter of the world’s population and acted as a powerful counterforce to the West. But by 1991, the two allies had gone in opposite directions. The impoverished USSR splintered into more than a dozen independent states, while China consolidated power and became an economic giant.
Liu, a Pulitzer Prize winner, used his lens to catch the poetry, drama and even humour of daily life under these regimes – and what happened when unrest inevitably boiled over.
The hardships of Soviet life can be seen in Liu’s snapshots of empty supermarkets, striking coal miners, pro-democracy marches, and a candlelit vigil after a massacre in Tbilisi, in what was then Soviet Georgia. But he also finds moments of beauty, such as a soldier smelling a flower, or a young girl being outfitted for a Russian ballet.
