This Sunday June 4 marked the 34th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, where tens of thousands of pro-democracy protestors (mostly students) peacefully gathered to demand greater intellectual freedom and government transparency. These protests abruptly ended on June 4, 1989, with a brutal assault by the military. People were arrested and killed for resisting the army’s effort to clean up the square and the streets. The actual number of casualties is still unknown today.
The Tiananmen Square event was followed by strong repressions of the artistic and intellectual circles. At the present time, this event is still highly sensitive to China's Communist leadership who has gone to exhaustive lengths to erase the movement from collective memory, omitting it from history textbooks and censoring online discussion of the crackdown. This invisibility has offered a space of resistance that led to visual explorations. Below is a selection of databases and authors who have explored this bloody event that people in the country are still afraid to talk openly about, or simply have never heard about.
Xu Yong, Negatives series
"On the attempt to cover-up and induce amnesia on an historic event, negatives have more direct impact as evidence than normal photographs or digital media. However, perhaps using this form to immunize against amnesia is not that important. What should be carefully considered are the social conditions that have resulted in the prolonged process of completing these works.” Xu Yong. Source:
photographyofchina.com/product/negatives
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