A prominent Thai art gallery became embroiled in a scandal last week when it removed parts of an exhibition following pressure from the Chinese embassy. Ironically, the title of the exhibition, hosted at the Bangkok Arts and Cultural Centre (BACC), is “Constellation of Complicity: Visualising the Global Machinery of Authoritarian Solidarity.” An introduction on its website stated, “Here, aesthetics operate not as metaphor, but as method [….] To map complicity is to name the actors who sustain oppression [….] To exhibit it is to disrupt its invisibility.” Since portions of the exhibition’s introductory wall text were literally obscured with black tape, the message took on a new dimension. Poppy Mcpherson and Napat Wesshasartar at Reuters reported on how the BACC’s exhibition came to be censored:
In what the artists called the latest attempt by Beijing to silence critics overseas, the Bangkok Arts and Cultural Centre changed multiple works by artists in exile in the exhibit on authoritarian governments collaborating across borders.
When Reuters visited on Thursday, some works previously advertised and photographed had been removed, including a multimedia installation by a Tibetan artist, while other pieces had been altered, with the words “Hong Kong”, “Tibet” and “Uyghur” redacted, along with the names of the artists.
Three days after the show, “Constellation of Complicity: Visualising the Global Machinery of Authoritarian Solidarity”, opened on July 24, Chinese embassy staff, accompanied by Bangkok city officials, “entered the exhibition and demanded its shutdown”, said the exhibit’s co-curator, Sai, a Myanmar artist who goes by one name.
In a July 30 email seen by Reuters, the gallery said: “Due to pressure from the Chinese Embassy – transmitted through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and particularly the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration, our main supporter – we have been warned that the exhibition may risk creating diplomatic tensions between Thailand and China.”
[…] Several days later, Sai told Reuters, the embassy demanded further removals. [Source]
There are signs that the BACC may have deliberately highlighted the censorship as a form of protest against it. “Rather than removing any names, we will place a black tab over the affected entries — serving as a statement itself and leaving the interpretation open to the public,” read an email by the BACC staff, as reported by the art publication Hyperallergic. Sai, the exhibition’s co-curator, said in an interview with Thai newspaper Khaosod that the BACC “never wanted to censor the exhibition. In fact, the institution showed remarkable courage and professionalism in resisting repeated demands from the Chinese Embassy.” Tibetan artist Tenzin Mingyur Paldron, whose work was originally showcased in the exhibit, provided more detail on his website about which items were censored. These include three films, a novel on Tibetan exile, postcards and zines on China’s ties with Israel, and two flags:
Films
1. Earth Is Heard. 4 minutes. Videography by Tsering Bista. Additional footage by Mona Chopra. Narrated by PC, writing and editing by Doc Tenzin.
2. some men go to mars, others pay attention to the Earth. 3 minutes. Story by Doc Tenzin and Pala, animation by Tenzin Lhamo.
3. Listen to Indigenous People (A Trans Tibetan Scholar and Survivor Speaks on the Dalai Lama). 12 minutes. Written and edited by Doc Tenzin.
Textiles
[…] 5. 13 oppressed peoples’ flags, 2×3 feet (Haiti, Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Palestine, Flag of the Indigenous Woman, Haudenosaunee Confederacy, Mapuche, Roma, Kurdistan, Artsakh (Armenia), Rohingya, East Turkestan, Tibet.) (last two flags removed due to pressure from the Chinese government. Reuters)
Text objects
[…] 3. We Measure the Earth With Our Bodies, a novel by Tsering Yangzom Lama
4. Postcards and zines on collective struggle and liberation by Liz Hee @lizar_tistry. Includes China, Israel, and the “Xinjiang” Mode [Source]
The Thai and Chinese governments have recently increased their cooperation in various domains. In late February, Thailand deported 40 Uyghurs to China in a secretive operation under pressure from the Chinese government. China has also taken a more assertive approach in dealing with security issues related to Thailand: around the same time as the deportations, China’s assistant minister for public security Liu Zhongyi made a personal visit to assess scam centers across the Thai-Myanmar border.
On the other side of the globe, the novel “We Measure Earth With Our Bodies” by Tibetan author Tsering Yangzom Lama, which was removed from the BACC’s exhibit, was also censored by another museum. The author stated that the Paris-based Guimet Museum, famed for its collection of Asian art, had nominated a French translation of her novel for its Emile Guimet Asian Literature Prize, only for the museum to identify her as “Chinese” and later scrub any mention of her or her novel from the museum’s website. (See CDT’s 2023 interview with Tsering Yangzom Lama on the importance of listening to Tibetans’ stories.)
Last month, French media reported that four Tibetan groups—Students for a Free Tibet, France; France Tibet; Association Lions des Neiges Mont-Blanc; and the Tibetan Women’s Association France—filed a legal complaint against the Guimet Museum, accusing it of attempting to “erase the existence of Tibet.” The complaint is the latest development in a long-running controversy over French museums’ alleged Sinicization of Tibet. While another French museum, the Quai Branly, backtracked on using the term “Xizang” for “Tibet,” the Guimet Museum has refused to do so after renaming certain rooms of an exhibit last year from “Nepal-Tibet” to “Himalayan World.” Le Monde reported that Chinese authorities had subjected the museum to sustained pressure, and Tibetan specialists criticized the museum’s justifications for the renaming. Jo Lawson-Tancred from Artnet News provided more detail on the motivation behind the recent legal complaint:
Musée Guimet—one of the largest collections of Asian art outside of Asia—recently renamed its Nepal-Tibet gallery as “Himalayan world,” which the groups claim is “sowing confusion about Tibet’s cultural distinctiveness with the political aim of erasing Tibet’s existence,” according to AFP, which first reported the news of the lawsuit.
“Replacing the name of the gallery ‘Tibet-Nepal’ with the expression ‘Himalayan World’ is not justified from a scientific perspective, culturally, or pedagogically, and contributes to the erasure of Tibet,” said Lily Ravon and William Bourdon, who are lawyers representing the groups.
They also allege that the museum has eliminated mentions of “Tibetan art” from its collection, amid ongoing tensions between pro-Tibetan groups and Beijing over the preservation of the region’s traditional Buddhist identity. The French associations argue in the legal complaint that the changes at Guimet breach the museum’s statutory mission to contribute to “education, training and research.”
“Given that four of the five members of the museum’s board of directors are known to be close to the Chinese government,” Ravon and Bourdon said in an email, “it is difficult not to see this as a partisan-driven move and a deliberate choice by the Guimet Museum to comply with Chinese lobbying demands, which are keenly relayed in France.” [Source]
In a response to the complaint, the museum said that it did not seek to “render a culture invisible, let alone deny Tibetan identity.” Later, the museum’s president, director of conservation and collections, director of programming and public relations, and director of its Asian art international research center collectively penned an op-ed in French outlet Le Figaro titled, “No, the Guimet Museum did not give in to any Chinese pressure,” which argued that the complaint is an “unfounded attack because it is based on arguments that are more political than cultural and scientific.” (Le Figaro has published paid advertorial inserts from Chinese state-media outlets, and until 2020 it had published China Daily’s “China Watch” supplement. The French outlet has continued to publish content from Chinese state actors, including a speech by Xi Jinping last year. In April, Le Figaro’s deputy general manager met with Xinhua’s president and agreed to “strengthen [their] communication and coordination.”)
French outlet Le Point published an article last week on the controversy, noting that the Chinese Embassy in Paris has organized several events at the Guimet Museum over the past couple of years. These include two editions of the “Forum Chine-France de Paris,” which featured speeches by notorious “wolf-warrior” Lu Shaye, and other events from which guests left with gift bags filled with books by Xi Jinping, according to one guest. The museum’s board includes well-known supporters of China, such as former French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, an “old friend” of China to whom Xi Jinping awarded China’s Friendship Medal. Tibet scholar Katia Buffetrille also noted that the exhibit had no maps and that the name Tibet has been erased from the museum’s other exhibit on Tang China, replaced by “Tubo,” an ancient Chinese term for Tibet.
France and China celebrated 60 years of diplomatic relations last year and marked the occasion by increasing Sino-French cultural exchanges in the arts. During the summer, however, the French government quietly expelled the top two Paris-based officials of China’s Ministry of State Security for their involvement (attempted kidnapping) in transnational repression against Chinese and Uyghur dissidents.
