Police smash Tiananmen replica as artist Guo Jian faces expulsion
Mr Guo’s artwork when it was still covered in pork
Guo Jian painstakingly cleaned the installation when the pork began to rot – only for it to be reduced to rubble after he was detained by Beijing police on June 1.
“How ironic. They completed the Tiananmen art work perfectly,” said Madeleine O’Dea, an art writer and friend of Mr Guo.
The naturalised Australian citizen now faces expulsion from China and separation from his ailing father, who has cancer, for an alleged visa violation.
Hong Lei, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, said on Friday that the artist had “committed fraud to obtain a temporary residence permit and was discovered by Beijing police”. Mr Guo has invested in a restaurant business in Beijing and lives in Songzhuang, an artists’ colony in the capital’s eastern suburbs.
“We understand Mr Guo will be detained for 15 days and then required to depart China,” a spokesman for Australia’s department of foreign affairs and trade said.
Friends and human rights groups suspect that Mr Guo, a former People’s Liberation Army soldier who moved to Sydney in 1992 and returned to Beijing nine years ago, was in fact targeted because of an interview published in the Financial Times one day before his detention.
In the interview, the veteran of China’s brief border war with Vietnam in 1979 recalled his later participation in the Tiananmen Square protests, which erupted when he was a final-year fine arts student at Beijing’s Minzu University.
“It seems quite clear that he’s being deported merely for [exercising] his freedom of expression, whether it was through the interview or his diorama that he made,” said William Nee, China researcher with Amnesty International in Hong Kong. “Viewing that gives people a visceral reaction to the carnage that happened in and around Tiananmen Square 25 years ago.”
Mr Guo’s artwork when it was still covered in pork
Ms O’Dea said Mr Guo “is a great believer in talking about what happened at Tiananmen because he feels that the fact this huge important historical event has become an unmentionable subject is just nuts”.
“And someone like him who was there, why shouldn’t he talk about it?”
The Financial Times visited Mr Guo’s studio on Friday with three of the artist’s friends, who were relieved to see his paintings had not been damaged. “He is such an important artist. We need to get a videographer here to document the paintings,” said one of the friends, who asked not to named.
Earlier in the day, police briefly returned to the studio with Mr Guo, who was wearing a blue and yellow detention centre uniform and had a brief exchange with a Sydney Morning Herald reporter. “Thanks, mate,” the artist said when informed that many friends and supporters were concerned about his wellbeing.
Beijing police also took away Mr Guo’s computer, on which he saved images of his Tiananmen pork piece and other works, but left behind dozens of boxes of Playboy-brand beer that the artist had been storing for a friend.
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In the run-up to the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Amnesty International has documented the detention of dozens of activists across China. While some of the individuals have been released on bail over recent days, as many as 18 people face criminal charges including rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang. Mr Guo is the only detainee to face deportation.
Mr Guo returned to China in part to be closer to his elderly parents. His father, also a PLA veteran, recently underwent surgery for cancer. “Under international law the government should try to protect families,” Mr Nee said. “It’s really depressing that so-called dissidents or people with opposing viewpoints are separated from their elderly parents. It’s a real tragedy.”
Many exiled leaders of the 1989 student movement, such as Wu’er Kaixi, have been banned from returning to China to see their families.