After White Paper Protest, a Heavy Silence Falls in China
China's art community was quick to join protests over Xi Jinping's handling of Covid-19, but few in the authoritarian state are still willing to speak out.
Andreas Blank, After a Conversation 6 (2019). Marble. 40 x 30 x 4 cm. Courtesy Choi & Lager Gallery.
China's art community quickly lent their support to the so-called 'white paper protest' that erupted after at least 10 Urumqi residents died in an apartment fire on 25 November.
The deaths were blamed on the country's stringent zero-Covid policy, which has seen people in high-risk areas locked in their housing compounds. Video shared online showed firefighters unable to access the building due to barricades erected to keep residents inside.
One 42-year-old Beijing artist, who has exhibited extensively abroad, had never seen the Chinese art community so politically active. For him it was a chance to push for more freedoms and democratic rights.
'I never picked this government, yet they order me around and decide my life. Why?'
(Several sources' names were removed from this article for their protection.)
Others just wanted to show solidarity. Despite believing a gathering wouldn't change anything, a 26-year-old artist in Shanghai joined protestors on 27 November because 'I couldn't stay at home anymore.'
She was angered by the arrests of demonstrators who had gathered on Wulumuqi Lu, a road named after Urumqi, the previous day.
Freedom of expression is limited for Chinese artists. Artwork criticising the government is banned from public exhibition, and local culture bureaus hold lists of artists who cannot exhibit due to their political record. China's most outspoken artist, Ai Weiwei, was briefly detained in 2011 and has experienced de facto bans on his work.
Despite the risks, artists and other art professionals took to social media, sharing the same images of the protests as other Chinese netizens, including the eponymous white pieces of paper held up by crowds.
Blank paper balances self-censorship and self-expression, protecting the protestor while saying what needs to be said.
'Nobody wants to be taken by the police,' the Beijing artist said, arguing uncaptioned posts of blank pieces of paper on Instagram and WeChat, are safe, as they are 'nothing.'
The blank page was also used by protestors in Hong Kong in 2020, implying that the new National Security Law proposed by Beijing was eroding their freedom of expression. But a similar ploy in Russia to protest the war in Ukraine did not stop demonstrators being arrested by the Kremlin.
The Beijing artist, who visited protests in the Chinese capital on 27 November and posted the blank piece of paper on his Instagram, sees the gesture as in keeping with his craft.
'Chinese art is difficult,' he said. 'If you want to say something [political], you cannot, so you use a lot of metaphors.'
'Artists are the first to be affected by oppression,' said Cui Baozhong, an art critic and curator based in Paris. Artists require internal and external freedom to create good art, Cui argued, but 'external oppression makes the artist engage in some kind of self-censorship.'
Some artists used the blank piece of paper as the basis for their own creations, like oil painter Sun Xun, who shared a photo of a blank canvas.
Miao Ying, whose work often alludes to Chinese internet censorship, re-posted her 2016 piece Problematic GIFs — no problem at all, which is dominated by a white box with a small red 'x' in the corner, suggesting a digital image has been removed.
And underground artist Deng Yufeng re-posted images of his 2018 exhibition, 346,000 Wuhan Citizens' Secrets, a gallery filled with ostensibly blank pieces of A4 paper that reveal text under UV light.
Despite the actions taken by artists and others, the movement described as an 'A4 revolution' appears to have slowed to a standstill. Many big names in China's art establishment have not publicly commented on the protests.
Some curators and artists removed white paper and more vocal forms of protest from their Instagram accounts, and Ocula Magazine's requests for comment to 12 artists and curators were turned down or left unanswered.
'I've been encouraging people to delete any posts [about the protest] on Instagram,' said the 30-year-old editor of an art magazine who attended the protests in Shanghai, believing censors were looking through posts.
In private, she said her young artist friends are still frenziedly talking about the protests, but they're primarily concerned with helping contacts held in police custody, some of whom she claimed were only released on Wednesday 7 December.
She believes it is too early to tell how this will impact the Chinese art world, but she has faith the 'urge to express' will continue to guide artists around censorship.
She believes some artworks inspired by the protests will emerge, 'maybe later on, but not now.'
Meanwhile, the protests do seem to have had an effect, with China reportedly loosening the requirements to test, scan QR codes tracking their movements, and quarantine at government facilities. Researchers predict Covid-19 deaths in the country could reach 1.6 million or exceed 2 million. —[O]
