Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Lao Li is director of the Songzhuang Art Museum and the Li Xianting Film Fund, which for ten years organized the Beijing Independent Film Festival. In a 2010 interview, Fang Lijun stated, “Lao Li was like the sun in the sky, shining down on all of us.” In August 2014, authorities closed the festival the day before it was to open. More than a dozen police arrived to confiscate documents from the festival office; officers detained Lao Li and two collaborators, forcing them to sign papers assenting to the cancellation, then turned off the electricity at the festival venue. They later blockaded the space where the Li Xianting Film Fund had for many years offered a workshop for aspiring filmmakers, which now moved to a secret countryside location. The organizers were bewildered. “Our main goal is to open our students’ minds—to teach them new ways to think about life and cinema,” said Fan Rong, the festival’s executive director. “Nothing we want to do is against the party or the government.”

After bringing his 1993 lawsuit over abuse at the hands of the police, Yan Zhengxue, the “mayor” of Yuanmingyuan, was sent to a reeducation labor camp for two years. He produced some hundred paintings of dark landscapes oozing blood under black suns, each divided by a central vertical line—the result of his attempt to conceal the true themes of his pictures by painting only half at a time. To get them out, he would stuff them into plastic bags, conceal them in his underwear, and then drop them into the vats of excrement that passed for camp lavatories; his children and friends would go there to retrieve them. He has been brought into police custody more than a dozen times since his release. In 2007, he was imprisoned for “subversion of state power.” He made no art during this two-year sentence. “I was tired of fighting,” he said. He attempted to hang himself.

Transgender performance artist Ma Liuming was jailed in 1994 on charges of pornography. All performance art became illegal after Zhu Yu displayed a video of his performance allegedly eating a fetus in the 2000 Fuck Off show in Shanghai organized by Ai Weiwei and Feng Boyi. Wang Peng, who grew up in a rural village but works in Beijing, knew nothing of the Tiananmen massacre until 2002, when he gained access to software that broke China’s Internet firewall. He abandoned abstract painting to work with bloodied surgical gloves retrieved from clinics where forced abortions take place. He said that learning of the massacre “made me want to rip open the most shocking and ugly side of society. It made me realize beauty is not what’s important, reality is.” Chen Guang was one of the soldiers at Tiananmen, and the memory of that horror informs his blood-soaked imagery. After he staged a private show at home in 2014, he was taken away by the police, who came to his humble apartment with four armed vehicles. In 2015, Shanghai artist Dai Jianyong was arrested for “creating a disturbance” after he sent friends a Photoshopped image that showed President Xi Jinping with a mustache and crinkled eyes; he faces five years in prison.

Shipping crates of Zhao Zhao’s work were seized by authorities in 2012. After they were taken, he was told that he had to pay a fine of about $48,000, though he was charged with no crime. He would not get his work back in any case, but after he paid, he would be allowed to see it once before it was destroyed. He had no means to raise such a sum. Asked if he was afraid following this incident, he replied, “I don’t want to become cautious.”