Anish Kapoor does a Gangnam Style in support of Ai Weiwei

 

Turner Prize-winning artist Anish Kapoor has made a rousing (and funny!) video in support of prominent Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. 

Amnesty International activists and various artists gathered at Anish Kapoor’s London studio this week to shoot a parody of South Korean rapper Psy’s mega hit Gangnam Style film in support of Ai.  Ai’s had done his own version last month, featuring the original video interspersed with clips of him and friends doing the popular dance, wearing handcuffs to represent the lack of freedom of speech in China. The film was immediately removed from the web by the Chinese authorities.

Kapoor’s parody version, called "Gangnam for Freedom", was choreographed by Akram Khan, who helped craft the Olympic opening ceremony for London 2012.  Leading figures from the arts, including artists Mark Wallinger, Bob and Roberta Smith and Tom Phillips, dancers Tamara Rojo and Deborah Bull, Southbank Centre Director Jude Kelly, made cameo appearances.  

The video also includes contributions sent from MoMA, Guggenheim, New Museum, Brooklyn Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Helen Bamber; Hanif Kurieshi, and many others.  

Kapoor, who sported a brigh pink T-shirt in the video, said: “Our film aims to make a serious point about freedom of speech and freedom of expression. It is our hope that this gesture of support for Ai Weiwei and all prisoners of conscience will be wide-ranging and will help to emphasize how important these freedoms are to us all.” 

The film has won support from various human rights organizations, among them, Amnesty, Liberty, Index on Censorship and The Helen Bamber Foundation.  

Museums and organizations around the world will be screening the film, including the ICA who will be showing the film prior to each feature shown in their cinema from Friday, for two weeks.

10th-year anniversary of Falun Gong persecution in China

Tomorrow, July 20th, marks the 10th-year anniversary of the baffling, but ruthless persecution of Falun Gong in China.

Falun Gong, which counts millions of members mostly in China, but also elsewhere in the world, is a holistic practice guided by the principles of “truthfulness, compassion and tolerance”, based on slow-moving exercises and meditation.

Falun Gong has no formal structure and is not a religion, yet it was banned as “an evil cult” in China ten years ago by then Chinese Communist Party president Jiang Zemin. It is believed Jiang felt threatened by the growing popularity of the practice. It is banned only in China, but practiced freely in 80 countries.

On July 20th 1999, hundreds of Falun Gong practitioners were dragged from their beds in the middle of the night, and over the next few days tens of thousands were detained throughout China. When all the police stations and detention centres were full, many were held in sports stadiums and other public facilities.

“Like any normal day, I went to do Falun Gong exercises in Yuyuantan Park in the centre of Beijing at 6am,” says Cambridge resident Jingwen Wang, who lived in Beijing at the time. “I heard the government had banned Falun Gong, so I decided to appeal. At 7am I arrived at the Appeals Office, but I was swiftly forced onto a coach, along with other practitioners. After driving a long time, we arrived at Shijingshangymnasium. There were already about 4,000 practitioners there. It was very hot, about 37 degrees. Thousands of people stayed there without any water, food or fresh air for the whole day.”

Since then, hundreds of thousands of Falun Gong followers have been imprisoned in labour camps and prisons across the country. They account for the largest single population of prisoners of conscience in China, according to Amnesty International. Tens of thousands have been tortured and over 3,200 have lost their lives. Millions others face destitution, job loss, expulsion from school and other form of discrimination.

Annie Yang, a former antique trader in Beijing who now lives in London, was arrested in 2005 and sent to two years in labour camp for being a member of Falun Gong.

“Every day I was forced to sit for over 18 hours, in a strict sitting posture: both legs and knees pressed tightly against each other; both hands rested over the knees, the back kept straight, and eyes open. After a week or two, many people’s bottoms started to rot. After endless days of both mental and physical persecution my eyesight became bad and my memory weak. My hair turned white and mentally I almost reached total collapse. Every day the only thing I thought about, when I was able to have a moment to think, was how to end my life. Was it better to smash my head on a radiator or to drink washing powder?”

Now, ten years later, the brutal repression shows no signs of abating.

To mark the 10th anniversary of the Falun Gong repression and attract attention to their plight, members are staging a press conference at noon at Westminster in London and a peaceful protest in Parliament Square all day-long. They are also hosting an art exhibition nearby in Palmer Room, 1 Great George Street, SW1 3AA from 11 am to 4 pm. The exhibit Uncompromising Courage, which has toured more than 40 countries since 2004, portrays the beauty of the traditional Chinese meditation practice, Falun Gong, and at the same time depicts the personal experiences of the artists and others who have been persecuted under the Chinese Communist Party."

Falun Gong repression: ten years later

I've met Annie Yang at a press briefing at the Foreign Press Association in London last week. She works in a Fish&Chips shop in London and lives alone, thousands of miles away from her son and former life as an antique trader in Beijing. If she were to go back to China, she would be re-arrested, tortured again, and probably killed.

Yang was arrested in 2005 and sent to two years in labour camp for being a member of Falun Gong, a Buddha-school spiritual movement, which counts millions of members mostly in China, but also all over the world.

The Chinese government, unsettled by the size of the movement, banned Falun Gong as an “evil cult” in July 1999, two months after 10,000 practitioners staged a day of silent protest in Beijing on April 25 1999.

Now, ten years later, the brutal repression shows no signs of abating, but the world's attention has shifted elsewhere. Hundreds of thousands of Falun Gong followers remain imprisoned in Chinese labour camps and prisons - the largest single population of prisoners of conscience in the country, according to Amnesty International. Tens of thousands have been tortured and over 3,200 have lost their lives. Millions others face destitution, job loss, expulsion from school and other form of discrimination.

On the tenth anniversary of the persecution, Edward McMillan-Scott, Vice-President of the European Parliament, who spoke at the Foreign Press Association recently, is urging Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations to investigate “the systematic process of imprisonment without trial, escalating torture and the murder of thousands of innocent people under torture,” he said at a recent press conference in London. “The age of impunity is over and those who know what is taking place in China look to you to take action,” his letter to Ki-moon reads.

He is particularly concerned by the fact that Falun Gong members, who neither drink nor smoke, have become the prime source for the People's Liberation Army's lucrative organ transplant trade.