The dissident award-winning artist keeping a close watch on China
In an upstairs room of a Collingwood gallery hangs a line of colourful prints on a wall. It’s only when you look closely that you see small areas of damage, evidence of their role in a troubled recent past.
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.
Badiucao with a work from his new exhibition, Disagree Where We Must.Credit: Jason South
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.
An artwork featuring activist Joshua Wong which was originally due to be displayed in Hong Kong in 2018.Credit: Jason South
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”.
It screened for several days, he says. “But right after I claimed [authorship of] the work and explained the intention behind it, overnight [it was] taken down.”
One wall in the main space features only a small painting, alongside a watch in a boxy frame. The painting depicts a student taking part in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. It’s based on a photograph, and in it the boy stretches his arm towards the left.
Watercolour works by Badiucao.Credit: Jason South
It appears he is pointing to the watch, which is in its own frame. At first glance, it looks unremarkable, but, the artist explains, it is one of the timepieces that were gifted to soldiers who played a part in the massacre, “to justify what they were doing, and also buy their loyalty”. Printed at the six o’clock position is the head of a soldier wearing a helmet.
The watches are hard to come by these days, and while many of the works on display are for sale, the watch is not. Badiucao points to its value as a historical object, something that highlights an atrocity that “the Chinese government tried to erase”. “I’d love to donate it to a museum or institution under the condition that it will be displayed for the public,” he says.
The final room is taken up by a series of watercolour paintings, some drawn from his work as a political cartoonist. It’s easy, he says, to dismiss political cartoons as ephemeral, tied to specific moments in the news cycle. “But when we’re talking about the situation in an authoritarian regime like China, because there’s a lack of freedom of speech, because there’s a lack of public memory for those very important social affairs and incidents of human rights abuses, this makes it very important to have some form of visual reference. ”
Taken as a whole, Badiucao’s work tackles the dimming of freedom in Hong Kong, the Tiananmen Square massacre, enforced labour camps for the Uyghur population in Xinjiang, the erasure of culture in Tibet, how the LGBTQ community is repressed in China and, he says, “subjects like how China is supporting Russia’s invasion in Ukraine, how China is posing a deadly threat to Taiwan’s democracy [and] basically rehearsing war constantly”.
He also has work that focuses on the detention of journalist Cheng Lei, and is critical of how the Australian government’s attempt to navigate our relationship with China is “putting economic benefits ahead of other important values, and even to some extent risks sacrificing our national security”.
But the exhibition is not solely focused on China. “As a Chinese-Australian dissident artist, it seems I will always be categorised as concerned or caring about one aspect of the world,” he says. “But the reality is I believe human rights are a universal value.”
To illustrate the point, he motions to a pair of works on the far wall. One depicts handcuffs made of cable ties, the other a bag of flour riddled with bulletholes. Their inclusion is “addressing the situation in Gaza, highlighting the crisis of starvation, but also pointing out the brutality of Hamas during the October 7 attack”.
At the core of Disagree Where We Must is a pushback against silence, and a call to bring issues into the open.
“There must be some way that universal compassion can be applied and formed towards innocent civilians who suffer from these conflicts,” he says. “I think it’s important that we do not avoid discussion on such issues, [that] we do not avoid disagreement on certain issues, but continue to have communication. And it’s very important to stop demonising each other in a way that’s stopping such an exchange from happening.”
Disagree Where We Must is at Goldstone Gallery in Collingwood until August 28.
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