Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Screenshot
IN JULY OF this year, an exhibition in the Bangkok Art and Culture Center (BACC) was censored at the behest of Chinese authorities. The exhibition was titled “Constellation of Complicity: Visualising the Global Machinery of Authoritarian Solidarity” and focused on authoritarian governments. The BACC is among Thailand’s leading contemporary art centers.
In particular, after the exhibition’s opening on July 24, the exhibition organizers were informed by Thai authorities that if the exhibition was to go on as planned, materials that touched on the Chinese government would need to be censored or redacted. A matter of particular sensitivity was that the exhibition touched on China’s detention of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
Not long after the exhibition opened, Chinese embassy officials visited the exhibition and ordered it to be shut down. The exhibition’s curator, the Burmese artist Sai, was thereafter forced to flee Thailand due to fear of retaliation. When the exhibition reopened, the names of artists from Hong Kong, Tibet, and Xinjiang were censored, and the words “Hong Kong,” “Tibet”, and “Uyghur” were redacted. Pieces containing the Tibetan and Uyghur flags were removed, as were pieces that depicted Chinese president Xi Jinping, and work that highlighted links between China and Israel. Chinese officials visited again, demanding more changes be made, so as to comply with the “One China Principle”.
Image of the installation
Still, Sinophone activists and artists noted the incident carefully. On October 12th, as a means of addressing this censorship, a group of activists and artists from Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, and Thailand, terming themselves “Visitors”, responded through a guerrilla art installation in the BACC.
The art installation itself imitated the means by which artists’ names were redacted by Thai and Chinese authorities in the original “Constellation of Complicity” exhibition. An image of Chinese president Xi Jinping, termed “XJP”, featured in this installation and was termed the responsible artist.
A statement later released by the artists highlighted how the actions of Chinese and Thai authorities served to highlight the very complicity that the original exhibition hoped to point out. The statement emphasized that the participating artists hoped “to voice our dissent” and that by “invit[ing] ourselves into the conversation […] We stand not only in solidarity with the artists, but also with all who refuse to be silenced and who continue to confront censorship imposed by authorities around the world.”
The statement further went on to state that they “hope[d this small action can spark broader conversations about censorship, and expand and visualize the idea of a “constellation of solidarity” in more places”. To this end, they hoped to call on others to “recreat[e] and brin[g] artwork to your own communities—wherever censorship has taken place.”
Statements released by participating Sinophone artists highlighted their experiences of living under Chinese censorship, but that rather than emphasizing cliches about the “China threat”, they hoped to highlight the many layers of complicity that serve to sustain authoritarian regimes. The artwork, then, was a way to allow Xi Jinping himself to join the exhibition but also to serve as a show of strength and resistance, in making the invisible visible.
Perhaps this goes to show that if the Chinese government hoped to sweep the matter under the rug through its censorship, this proved to have the opposite effect. As a covert act of solidarity, this demonstrates that resistance occurs across borders, and that censorship sometimes instead leads to a mobilization of solidarity.