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
Guo Jian
Artist Guo Jian: deported for creating art recalling the Tiananmen Square massacre. Photograph: Emerging Collective
Monica Tan
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.”