Contemporary Democracy Art Exhibition — History Turned a Corner Here

Running alongside the programme marking 34 years since June 4th, this exhibition used art as a medium for actively connecting the region’s democratic forces. Through the creative freedom the works embodied, it broke through silence and the boundaries of language, and paired the art with newspapers from the period and a timeline of major world events, walking visitors through the global situation of the 1980s and 1990s and the causes and consequences of the Tiananmen massacre — why the students and citizens in the square resisted politics imposed from above, and how the authoritarian party-state drove their protest towards bloodshed.

The exhibition expressed the New School for Democracy’s stance of holding the Chinese authorities to account for the June 4th massacre and standing with victims of human rights abuses and prisoners of conscience. It was the organisation’s second exhibition in this accessible, educational form, following Refusing to Be Silenced: Metaphors of Resistance in 2022, combining the 3D-printed Pillar of Shame with historical artefacts to stage a dialogue between June 4th and contemporary democratic art.