“64”

“64”

As a Hong Konger, I felt the importance of freedom of speech and right of protest during the ongoing 2019-2020 Hong Kong protests and the media censorship by the Chinese Communist Party(CCP). This piece, “64”, gets its name from the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, which happens on the 4th of June. This incident is being censored and hidden from the public eyes both offline and online in China. The title itself is challenging the laws of China.

The typewriter is being placed on a desk and a roll of paper is being fed into it. The paper is then sent through a shredder which makes everything just typed out on the paper destroyed. On the paper are all censorship words and phrases that are being banned online in China. They are being typed in 3 different languages, Mandarin pinyin, Cantonese Jyutping and English. This represents my identity as a Hong Konger as we are educated with Bi-literacy and Tri-lingualism in school. I get this idea of shredding the paper once it’s being produced from thinking how shredder is usually used for confidential information. However in this case, the text is being eliminated once it’s published, like how the CCP bans freedom of speech and jails journalists for vilifying the Communist Party and government. The piece is put at a corner of the exhibition, near the start of the exhibition. Space is also left around the artwork in order to encourage viewers to move around and see the piece in different perspectives.

I have obtained the antique desk from a seller in Manchester which mentioned it is from a traditional boarding school from around the 1950s. The typewriter is a ADLER Universal 200, first produced in 1968. The stool and the shredder and both new. This emphasizes the procedure of timeline from the past to the future.