– Performance/intervention, Time Square Piazza, Hong Kong, 4/6/2008
I was in middle school in 1989 and we seldom learned anything about contemporary China in school at that time (the Chinese history textbooks end abruptly in the 1940s or even 1910s.) The Tiananmen Square Protest was an enlightenment for me on what was going on in contemporary China (this is true for my generation or even older ones). In the face of the 1997 sovereignty transfer from the United Kingdom to China, the crackdown turned our hope for democracy into fear and remained a trauma that haunted us from time to time afterwards. The tanks, the bloodshed, and the passionate goodwill of and the retaliation against the (student) protesters were all more shocking than anything that we (or my generation at least) had ever witnessed. The shock was so overwhelming that it troubled me for years and years. For me, art-making became a very expressive way to cope with these traumatic feelings (my first work on the June 4th incident was a theatrical play I wrote in high school!). Other than that, I have made numerous works related to June 4th – not only to commemorate those who lost their lives or freedom, but also to contemplate my troubled cultural identity in relation to a country from which I have felt so alienated since I was young.
The full text was published as part of the “Interviews: 1989-2019: Perspectives on June 4th from Hong Kong”, compiled by Judith Pernin and Eric Florence, China Perspective, 2019/2, pp. 81-86.