GlobThink

"Execution" by Yue Minjun, a painting which really reminds me of Tiananmen

Speaking Mandarin allowed me to learn a lesson about peace in my home country, the land of the Basques.

While I was living in Hong Kong,  I spent 3 holidays in Beijing taking a 3-week intensive Mandarin training each time. In one of those Beijing courses, I met a teacher who wanted to know more about her country’s recent history. She asked me about the events of Tiananmen square in 1989. I was afraid to answer. As she insisted so much, I finally accepted. We discussed about the historical context China was living at that time and, eventually, about the events in the square. All she had heard before about the events in the square was just rumors. She wanted to know more.

On a later visit to Beijing, I brought my teacher a 3-minute documentary about those events, which I had downloaded from youtube in Hong Kong. When I showed it to her, she bursted in tears!

At that very moment, while she started to cry, a sudden flash about my own country came into my mind. Why is she crying? Why don’t people usually cry in the Basque Country when they watch news about terrorism in the television? Maybe because they do not know the victims personally? But my teacher does not know anybody who was in Tiananmen either! Why then?

My teacher cried because nowadays Beijing people are not used to violence. Unfortunately, many Basque people are so used to the problem of violence in the Basque Country that are no longer shocked when somebody is killed. The lesson I learnt that day is that peace in Basque Country can only be constructed when we stop seeing violence as something normal. And  my opinion is that this can only be achieved through multiculturalism and education.

Important note

The events of Tiananmen in 1989 and the Basque terrorist problem are events of very different scales, historical backgrounds and significance in geographical and political terms. Although in this article I have established a subjective connection between them, they are not connected to each other in any possible objetive way.

Another important point is that the emotional charge that my teacher experienced with that documentary was by far much higher than that experienced by watching news about terror attacks.

About the Figure

Yue Minjun 岳敏君 is my favourite Chinese painter. He always paints people laughing ironically, even at the most serious things. Unlike people portrayed in his paintings, Yue Minjun is not laughing at all; he is making constructive criticism about nowadays China.

Yue Minjun’s is representative of a contemporary Chinese style called “Cynical Realism“. Cynical Realist artists make a humorous and post-ironic kind of art and provide a “realist perspective and interpretation of the transition that Chinese society has been through, from the advent of Communism to today’s industrialization and modernization”.

Yue Minjun’s “Execution” (above figure), which is clearly inspired in the events of Tiananmen, became the most expensive art work ever by a Chinese contemporary artist, when in 2007 it was sold for the equivalent of  US $ 5.9 million at Sotheby’s in London.