The Chinese-born Australian artist on the day he was detained and later deported from Beijing for daring to make art about China today
• Guo Jian: detained for refusing to abide by mass amnesia of Tiananmen
Artist Guo Jian: deported for creating art recalling the Tiananmen Square massacre. Photograph: Emerging Collective
Monday 3 November 2014 23.43 EST
Three days before the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Guo Jian gathered his friends for dinner. He was calling it his “last supper”, a joke his friends didn’t find too funny. Earlier that day, the 52-year-old had a haircut and cut his nails, motivated by a sense of foreboding that it might be a while before he’d have the opportunity to do so again.
The fear was well-founded. The Financial Times had published a lengthy interview with the Chinese-born Australian artist and art teacher that morning, in which he recounted taking part in China’s 1989 pro-democracy hunger strikes and the nightmarish, tragic massacre that followed. Also mentioned was an artwork Guo had been working on: a diorama of Tiananmen Square, mired by war, and then covered in pink, uncooked meat. The works had never left the privacy of his studio, but photos snapped by neighbours had begun circulating online.
Guo Jian’s Tiananmen Square
The artist’s diorama of an embattled Tiananmen Square. Photograph: Guo Jian
After dinner, Guo returned to his studio, situated on the furthest outskirts of Beijing in an artist village called Songzhuang. “I knew they were coming,” he tells me over the phone. “I looked around and thought: ‘what am I going to do with my studio?’ My mind was really empty. Waiting and waiting.”
It was a little before 1am when the bang on the door finally came. Guo – expecting just a few policeman – was greeted by 15 or 20 officers. They began questioning the artist about his artwork, which featured the Beijing landmark in a state of destruction. The artist tried to explain his inspiration for the work: a devouring urbanisation movement that required demolition of large swathes of the country – including sites of historical significance. Would Tiananmen Square be next?
Guo’s piece draws on the visual similarities between a war zone and a demolished building. But all the officers saw was a work that seemed to condone terrorism, no small matter following a 2013 incident in which a car deliberately crashed into the entrance of the Forbidden City, near Tiananmen Square. They arrested the artist, who was still in his sleepwear, and took him to the local police station.
In the room they used for questioning there sat a single chair, the metal kind, with hand and leg cuffs. “I said, ‘I’m not going to sit there!’” Guo tells the story with a wry sense of how absurd his situation was. After officers told him it was the only chair available, Guo still refused. “I said, ‘I’m going to stand, I’m not a criminal’. So they found another chair. They were trying to scare me.”
Guo’s interrogation continued through the night, and he noticed that among the changing rota of officers were more than simply local police. There were officers from the Tongzhou security department, the Beijing city security bureau, and most serious of all, the Ministry of State Security – the country’s top intelligence and security agency. The officers would often film their questioning, and Guo began to suspect they were planning to frame him on the evening news.
True to his Chinese upbringing, Guo’s biggest fear suddenly became what his parents might think – or more specifically, the public humiliation they would face. Televised criminal confessions are extremely popular in China. “So I looked at the camera, with that look: ‘fuck off’. I don’t want them to know I’m scared or give them a chance to make me look like I’m confessing.”
