Several changes have been made to an art exhibition on authoritarian regimes at the Bangkok Arts and Cultural Centre after repeated visits by Chinese embassy representatives, BBC News reports.
The show, titled “Constellation of Complicity: Visualising the Global Machine of Authoritarian Solidarity,” features work by exiled artists from countries like China, Russia, Iran and Burma.
But Burmese artist Sai told BBC News that the exhibition had been censored after angering the Chinese government. The report from BBC News, published on August 15, said that black paint now covered the names of several artists’s names and over part of the descriptions of homelands such as Tibet, Hong Kong and Xinjiang.
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“Most of the censored artworks were by the Tibetan artist Tenzin Mingyur Paldron. Television screens that were supposed to show several films by the artist—one was about the Dalai Lama—had been switched off,” Tessa Wong reported. “Tibetan and Uyghur flags had also been removed, as well as a novel about a Tibetan family in exile and a postcard about China, Israel and Xinjiang.”
The art exhibition at the Bangkok Arts and Cultural Center opened on July 26. The center’s main supporter is the Bangkok city government.
Management at the center did not respond to questions from BBC News. However, curators of the exhibition and two of the exhibiting artists, Paldron and Clara Chung, denied China’s accusations in their interviews with BBC News.
Sai also told BBC News that since the censorship, he and his wife had fled to the UK, where the couple plans to seek asylum.
When BBC News reached out to the Chinese embassy in Thailand, the embassy issued a statement that “accused the exhibition of openly promoting Tibetan, Uyghur and Hong Kong independence.” The embassy’s statement said that the “timely measures” showed that such a “false notion” has “no market internationally and is unpopular.”
The Chinese embassy’s statement to BBC News also said the exhibition at the Bangkok Arts and Cultural Center “disregards facts… distorts China’s policies on Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong, and harms China’s core interests and political dignity.”
Lord Alton of Liverpool, chair of the UK Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights, told BBC News that Sai’s case “illustrates the extensive reach of China’s campaign of transnational repression,” and that he would support Sai’s bid for asylum.
“To pressure an art exhibition to censor exhibits in a cultural center in another country is an outrageous violation of freedom of expression and should be widely exposed and condemned. The additional fears that this caused for Sai, leading him to flee Thailand for his security, are deeply concerning,” Alton told BBC News.
The Human Rights Foundation also called the changes made to the exhibition at the Bangkok Arts and Cultural Center “intimidation” that “reflects a coordinated effort to suppress artistic expression.”
ARTnews has reached out to the Chinese embassy in Thailand and the Bangkok Arts and Cultural Center.
