The recently concluded Dhaka Art Summit, the world’s largest exhibition of South Asian art, featured contemporary pieces by artists from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and other countries in the region.
The pieces were conceptual and relied on interpretation, but what the summit organisers had not counted on was the Chinese ambassador’s interpretation of diplomacy.
On the first day of the four-day summit, Ambassador Ma Mingqiang, upon encountering the exhibit by film-makers Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam titled “Last Words,” threatened the organisers of the summit with dire consequences if they did not take down the work.
He said the exhibit, which featured the final letters of five monks who protested the Chinese occupation of Tibet through self-immolation, offended him, which, incidentally, was exactly the point.
It offends almost all of us that peaceful monks have been driven to commit such extreme acts in the defense of freedom, and though he did not mean it like that, he took the bait all the same.
This was not the first time the Chinese embassy has deemed it worth their official influence to obstruct an art event in Bangladesh.
In 2009, an exhibition called “Into Exile: Tibet 1949-2009” was shut down at the behest of the Chinese government because it depicted Tibetan refugees crossing mountain-passes to get to India following the Chinese takeover of Tibet.
There was nothing explicitly subversive about the exhibition. Like the art at the summit, it consisted of real, documentary images. In fact, Drik Gallery, where the 2009 exhibition was held, is a press photography institute, and routinely puts on exhibitions with journalistic themes.
The Chinese regime has recently taken other widely criticised positions on humanitarian issues, such as the ban on fasting during the month of Ramadan for Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiyang, teaching local artists how to have a “correct view of art,” and forbidding puns on television and the radio to “preserve linguistic purity.”
China also puts the most number of people to death every year.
But all of that happens within the jurisdiction of China’s own national boundaries. Shutting down privately-run art exhibitions in another country is something else altogether.
That China can exert this much influence on the internal affairs of less powerful countries in the region speaks of its hegemonic intentions, and its ability to throw its weight around when they think the occasion calls for it -- but that it should do so for essentially non-political things like art summits also points to its insecurities.
Methinks the Chinese government doth protest too much, and in doing so belies the statement that Tibet is not an integral part of China. If it were, five photographs would not cause it so much trouble.
Poetic justice has followed China’s indelicate handling of the matter.
What might have been a quiet display in a small corner of a large summit has now taken the world’s media by storm, seen and heard of by millions of people.
Those five photos have gained an overnight, international audience, and the white cloth that shrouded it from visitors in Bangladesh has exposed it to activists and political commentators all over the globe.
Shooting oneself in the foot with such perfect precision is a fine art in itself.
