Justin Wong spent nearly two decades as one of Hong Kong's most recognized political cartoonists, drawing a daily column for Ming Pao newspaper while teaching comics and illustration at Hong Kong Baptist University. Then, in 2021, a five-hundred-word academic article he'd written about protest imagery triggered a sequence of events — a university administration that called the police, a four-day countdown, a one-way flight — that would end his life in Hong Kong for good.

In this episode, Justin speaks with Hugh Leeman about the collapse of Hong Kong's freedoms under the National Security Law, the slow erosion of artistic and academic space, and the surreal experience of losing two defining identities overnight. He reflects on Jimmy Lai — the Apple Daily founder now serving a twenty-year sentence — and the quiet daily ritual Wong created in  ...