2015-05-06
Artist Sun Kai during recent RFA interview.
RFA
A Chinese artist who was portraying the lives of 100 participants in the student-led 1989 pro-democracy movement in Beijing has abandoned the project in the face of growing pressure from the ruling Chinese Communist Party.
Sun Kai, who was a theatrical design student at the Shanghai Theater Academy when the 1989 movement began, said he has never been able to move on psychologically from the trauma of the June 4 bloodshed, in spite of having a rewarding career and family life.
“I have a huge Tiananmen complex. It’s very hard for me to forget it,” Sun told RFA on a recent trip to the United States.
“I keep wishing over and over that the events of that year could replay themselves, and that the Chinese mainland would turn in the direction of freedom and democracy, instead of things getting worse and worse, like they are now,” he said.
To address it, Sun said he made a list of 100 people across China who participated in the movement in various cities, and planned to shoot their portraits in a bid to preserve the memory of the hopes of a generation.
“I’m an artist, so I thought that I could put on an exhibition after I had finished shooting them, and maybe a photographic book about 1989,” he said.
“That 1989 generation, 25 years on, are all in their fifties now, and they’ll all be old in another few years,” Sun said.
“So I started to put [my idea] into practice.”
Face-to-face with 1989
Sun said the idea behind the project was to bring people today face-to-face with the events of 1989 once more, by discovering what had happened to the participants during the intervening years.
“Some of them have gone on to become very successful, but there a considerable group of people who have suffered intense persecution, and have no reliable way to make a living,” Sun said.
Dissidents like these are often regarded with prejudice by the majority of Chinese people, he said.
But it wasn’t long before Sun himself began to run into difficulties.
“My first stop was Zhengzhou, in Henan province, where I shot photographs of Yu Shiwen and his wife,” he said. “They, too, are unable to forget about June 4, 1989.”
