(Brescia) A torture chair transformed into a simple rocking chair, posters showing a teddy bear depicted as a warrior or machine guns aiming at umbrellas, symbols of the protests in Hong Kong: Chinese artist Badiucao mocks Beijing propaganda while appropriating its codes.
The city of Brescia in northern Italy has hosted since Friday the first international solo exhibition of this 35-year-old dissident cartoonist exiled in Australia, defying the injunction of the powerful Chinese regime to have it canceled.
His works are “filled with anti-Chinese lies” and “endanger the friendly relations between China and Italy”, the Chinese embassy in Rome had rebelled in a letter sent on October 14 to the town hall of Brescia.
But this city of barely 200,000 inhabitants stood up to it: “none of us in Brescia, neither in the city council nor among the citizens, had the slightest doubt about the maintenance of this exhibition”, a said Deputy Mayor Laura Castelletti, in a determined tone.
Brescia, known for its archaeological sites, has a long tradition of welcoming dissidents, painters and writers, in the name of “defending artistic freedom”, she said. The latest, the Kurdish artist Zehra Dogan, “persecuted by the Turkish regime”, and who exhibited her works there in 2019.
Many visitors flocked to the Santa Giulia Museum for the inauguration of the exhibition. “The town hall of Brescia did well to resist the pressure from the Chinese government, it is an intolerable interference! “, Judged one of them, Giovanni Aricci, 70 years old.
Shaggy beard, laughing eyes behind thick tortoiseshell glasses, Badiucao said he was “very happy and proud” that “Brescia had the courage to say ‘no’ to China in defense of fundamental rights”.
Entitled “China [n’] is [pas] near ”, referring to the title of a famous Italian film from the 1960s, the exhibition, scheduled until February 13, denounces the political repression in China and the censorship of the coronavirus pandemic, two explosive subjects for Beijing.
Death threats
“I use my art to expose the lies of the Chinese government, but I also pay tribute to the courage and intelligence of the Chinese, subjected to a very harsh environment with an authoritarian government,” said Badiucao in an interview with AFP .
A previous attempt to organize an exhibition in Hong Kong in 2018 failed due to pressure on the artist and his entourage: “the national security police went to intimidate my family in Shanghai” and “threatened to send officers at the inauguration ”.
Among the satirical works on display in Brescia that have provoked Beijing’s ire are the famous portraits of Chinese strongman Xi Jinping and Carrie Lam, the Hong Kong chief executive, with their faces blending together, to illustrate the erosion of the autonomy of the former British colony.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) does not “tolerate the power of creation, it thinks that all free artists are its enemies, that’s why it hates me so much”, assures Badiucao, who claims to be the target of ” daily death threats on social networks ”.
Another controversial work, about sixty bracelets painted with the artist’s own blood to represent the watches given, according to him, to Chinese soldiers as a reward for their participation in the repression on the night of June 3 to 4, 1989 of student demonstrations. on Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
“Chinese Banksy”
The exhibition also pays homage to “Tank Man”, the stranger in the white shirt who, the next day, stood up to the tanks, trying to stop their advance, armed with two plastic bags. A nod to the news, the armored vehicles remodeled by Badiucao are topped with grainy balls, symbols of COVID-19.
For the dissident, nicknamed, in spite of himself, “the Chinese Banksy”, there is no doubt that Beijing is “responsible for this catastrophe for the whole of humanity” by having been slow, according to him, to shed light on the virus in start of the pandemic.
If the Chinese government had listened to Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist who had alerted at the end of December 2019 to the appearance of a coronavirus in Wuhan, he “could have stopped the virus at a very early stage”, estimates Badiucao.
This “martyr” doctor had been reprimanded by the police who accused him of “spreading rumors”. Shortly after, in February 2020, he died of COVID-19.
The exhibition “has no intention of offending the Chinese people or Chinese culture and civilization,” the president of the Brescia Museum Foundation, Francesca Bazoli, told AFP. By showing these works, “we are supporting freedom of expression”.