The dissident award-winning artist keeping a close watch on China
Dissident Chinese artist Badiucao points to a scratch on one and steps back. 'Some of the frames are even broken', he explains, saying it was a deliberate choice to leave them this way.
These works were originally slated for display in 2018 at a doomed exhibition in Hong Kong. They now open his first Australian solo show, Disagree Where We Must.
One of the prints features Joshua Wong, a key figure in Hong Kong's pro-democracy Umbrella Movement. At the time it was created, Badiucao was working anonymously. But three days before the Hong Kong show was due to open, 'the Chinese government found out my identity and took my relatives into the police station, ' he says. In response, he cancelled his show. A year later he shed his anonymity and finally revealed his face and identity to the world.
The scratches and dings, he explains, help tell the story of how this group of works was hurriedly removed and hidden in the months and years after the show was cancelled.
The Shanghai-born Badiucao, who now lives in Australia, contributes to this masthead and is a Walkley Award winner for his cartoons, has always used his art to critique mainland China's government, its policies, and historical wrongs. This ethos is on full display in Disagree Where We Must.
Held in Collingwood's Goldstone gallery, a space opened by artist Nina Sanadze this year, the exhibition takes its title from the Labor government's stated approach to China: 'We will co-operate where we can, disagree where we must, but engage in our national interest.'
A room at the back of the space is devoted to a video that first screened on billboards in Hong Kong earlier this year in a test of the limits of free speech in the wake of the sweeping National Security Law implemented in 2020. In the four-second clip, Badiucao silently mouths the words 'you must take part in revolution'.
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