Bangkok Removes Artworks from Exhibit After ‘Pressure’ from China
Censored works include a film of Tibetans demanding accountability for genocide and references to China and Israel’s treatment of Muslims. Save to My Ocula
Bangkok’s leading art centre removed and altered artworks from an exhibition on authoritarian states and resistance after China’s demand to avoid ‘diplomatic tensions’.
Bangkok Arts and Cultural Centre censored works from an exhibition on state violence across borders after officials from the Chinese Embassy ‘demanded its shutdown’, artist and exhibition co-curator Sai told Reuters.
Constellation of Complicity: Visualising the Global Machinery of Authoritarian Solidarity opened on 24 July and included work addressing the treatment of ethnic and religious minorities by artists from Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Myanmar, Russia, and Syria.
‘We have been warned that the exhibition may risk creating diplomatic tensions between Thailand and China,’ an email by the Centre from 30 July reads, as reported by Reuters.
The message was transmitted through Thailand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the centre’s main sponsor, Bangkok Metropolitan Administration, the Centre said.
According to the exhibition text, the show sought ‘to reveal power in its entanglements, and to insist that art remains one of the last ungovernable territories of resistance’.
The Centre said they needed to make ‘certain adjustments’.
Removed works include Tibetan artist Tenzin Mingyur Paldron’s video of Tibetans demanding accountability for genocide while carrying Palestinian flags, postcards of Chinese President Xi Jinping, and a graphic on China and Israel’s treatment of Muslim communities.
Screens and texts have been blacked out, including the names of Paldron along with Uyghur artist Mukaddas Mijit, Hong Kong artists Clara Cheung and Gum Cheng Yee Man. The Centre’s website currently refers to these artists only as ‘France-based artist’ or ‘United States-based artist’.
The curators of the exhibition have since fled the country, Reuters reported.
‘It is tragically ironic that an exhibition on authoritarian cooperation has been censored under authoritarian pressure,’ Sai told Reuters. ‘Thailand has long been a refuge for dissidents. This is a chilling signal to all exiled artists and activists in the region.’
Curated by the Myanmar Peace Museum, the exhibition is set to close this October. —[O]
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