Sadness, anger and amazement. Danish sculptor Jens Galschiøt was indignant Thursday at the decision taken by the University of Hong Kong to unbolt his work, the “Pillar of Shame”, erected 23 years ago in this place in memory of the victims of the crackdown on Tiananmen Square, Beijing, in 1989.
“It’s just horrible”, dropped the artist joined by The duty in Denmark, just hours after a team of workers removed from public space the monumental 8-meter-high structure, made up of 50 bodies and faces distorted by pain.
“I knew that the University wanted to erase this memorial and I had asked to be able to remove it myself to repossess it,” he added on the other end of the phone. But I never got an answer. And there, two days before Christmas, in the middle of the night here, I learn that my work has been dismantled, to be locked in a container. The symbol of freedom in a container! This is completely crazy “.
Two months after ordering the removal of the sculpture – it was in October – the University authorities took action Thursday by previously concealing the work under tarpaulins and by erecting a security perimeter to repel possible protesters.
“Old statue”
By means of a press release, the management of the establishment justified its action against what it qualifies as an “old statue” by invoking an “external legal opinion and a risk assessment”, in order to “ protect the interests of the University ”.
Hong Kong was until recently the only place in China where the commemoration of the bloody crackdown on the 1989 student uprisings in Tiananmen Square in Beijing by the Chinese Communist dictatorship was still possible. Every June 4, students at the University of Hong Kong used to clean and repaint in orange – the color of democratic movements across the world – the sculpture of the Dane.
But the climate of freedom has crumbled considerably since 2020 in this territory and the adoption of a law on national security which now gives rise to the same totalitarian thought and the same social control as in the rest of the country.
Under this leadership, the repression of Tiananmen Square is now one of the taboo events that the Xi Jinping regime seeks to erase from collective memory. This rewriting of history involves, among other things, the debuffing of the statue shaped by Jens Galschiøt, but also the recent closure of the June 4 Museum in the city where the memory of the revolt of 1989 was still maintained.
“It seems that the sculpture was somewhat destroyed during its dismantling, assures the artist in an interview, but I do not yet know what the extent of the damage is”. According to a group of Hong Kong dissidents and pro-democracy activists exiled in Norway, the “Pillar of Shame” is now “in great danger”, as the Hong Kong government intends, according to testimonies gathered on the spot, to destroy it entirely. work, they said in a press release released on Thursday.
“It would be a scandal, protests Jens Galschiøt. This work is still my property, and Hong Kong copyright laws apply to it. I also intend, once the Christmas holidays have passed, to claim my rights to bring this sculpture back to Europe or elsewhere ”.
He said he had received a proposal to install it in front of the Chinese embassy in Washington, without further details. “By seeking to remove this sculpture, the Chinese regime has above all attracted attention again,” he said. And we must find a new place for it to remind the whole world what China is doing to democracy and freedoms ”.
The removal of the statue was decried all day Thursday by many exiled pro-democracy activists. ” The #PillarOfShame was removed, but memory survives. We must remember what happened on June 4, 1989 ”, wrote on Twitter Nathan Law, former elected pro-democracy from Hong Kong and refugee in the United Kingdom.
“Shame on the University of Hong Kong for destroying the history and collective memory of the Tiananmen Square massacre. You should be condemned to the pillar of shame ”, added on the same network Brian Leung, a Hong Kong dissident now living in the United States.
National security
This other gesture imposed on Hong Kong by China against freedom of expression and the duty to remember comes the day after the congratulations addressed by Chinese President Xi Jinping to the chief executive of the territory, Carrie Lam, for having “put end to chaos and disorder ”in this special administrative region.
A wind of protest began to blow in Hong Kong after the Chinese Communist regime decided in 2019 to renege on its promise to maintain the economic, legislative and way of life of Hong Kong people until 2047, that is to say 50 years. after the handover of this megalopolis to China by the United Kingdom.
This revolt was severely put down by Beijing and by the adoption of the National Security Law which criminalized much of the opposition, pro-democracy movements, supporters of self-determination or the media operating according to Western standards. This law also removed from the political scene the candidates who were not judged as “patriots” by the central power.
The renewal of the local Legislative Council was also played out within this new framework, on December 19, with a participation rate of barely 30%, the lowest since the retrocession of 1997.
With Agence France-Presse