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Ai Weiwei, Forever Bicycles, 2011 |
In the summer of 2007, I was invited to take part in an artist residency program at Platform China's Beijing International Artist Platform (BIAP). The project that I completed during my residency included wheatpasting up sections of hand printed wallpaper on the streets of Beijing, China. My prints, installed guerrilla style without permission, not only engendered much discussion with local residents but surprisingly stayed up for more than a week before all traces were removed. The prints conflated two divergent images of China. On top of highly romanticized images of China from anachronistic chinoiserie wallpaper, I silk screened photographic images of the "Tank Man ," an image banned in China, of a lone city resident standing up to a column of tanks on June 5th, 1989 in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. The image above and the images in my previous post show some of the installation of that project on the streets of Beijing. Also, the following blog mentions my work in connection with a series of paintings by Chen Guang, a former soldier that fired shoots in Tiananmen, - William Andersen
June 4, 1989 ...I was 21 and just coming into my own ...just moving out of my parents' home, just taking on my own ideas about politics, religion, war, life, love and everything... since I was young, every time I had uttered even the slightest criticism of the USA, my parents would tell me to "go live in Russia," and I still remember having to crouch down under my desk or go hide in the basement of my grade school as a drill to prepare for a Russian atomic missile strike (like that would have saved us in any way)... now, in the summer of 1989, the Soviet Union was collapsing, Poland's Solidarity movement was challenging Communist rule and winning 99% of the vote in semi-free elections, the Berlin Wall was soon to fall, it seemed only inevitable that the peaceful pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square would mean an end to Communist totalitarian rule in China. I remember watching the students live on all the TV screens at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where I had just declared my major as art (against my parents' wishes) and I felt a real solidarity with these rebellious freedom lovers...
中國六四白上衣
羅青
在 六月四日 那天
那天一大清早
天安門廣場一角
一定會出現一個白上衣
在 六月四日 那天
一個穿白上衣的人
一定會出現在中國大地的中心
在 六月四日 那天
全中國的人都自動穿上白上衣
自動降下了一望無垠的六月雪
在全中國的土地上
在 六月四日 那天
2009年6月4日清晨.
一首行為藝術詩
Lo Ch'ing is a well known Chinese scholar, poet and painter, and I am lucky enough to be able to count him as a personal friend. Born in Mainland China in 1948, his family escaped to Taiwan fleeing the communist takeover. As a child, one of his instructors in traditional Chinese arts was Pu Hsin Yu (溥儒), the cousin of Puyi (溥儀), the last emperor of China.
