HONG KONG – The Danish artist behind a Hong Kong sculpture mourning those killed in Tiananmen Square has instructed a lawyer to secure his work and bring it overseas after the city’s flagship university ordered its sudden removal.
The 8m-high Pillar of Shame by Jens Galschiot has sat on the University of Hong Kong’s campus since 1997, the year the city was handed back to China.
It features 50 anguished faces and tortured bodies piled on one another and commemorates democracy protesters killed by Chinese troops around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Last week Hong Kong’s oldest university ordered it to be removed by 5pm today citing “legal advice” as authorities crack down on dissent.
Galshiot said he had hired a local lawyer and requested a hearing with the university over the future of the statue as the deadline looms.
“I hope that my ownership of the sculpture will be respected and that I will be able to transport the sculpture out of Hong Kong under orderly conditions and without it having suffered from any damage,” he said via email.
Galschiot said he would prefer the statue to have stayed in Hong Kong. If it was destroyed by authorities, he said, Hong Kongers should collect “as many pieces of the Pillar of Shame as possible”.
“These pieces may be used to make some symbolic manifestation that ‘empires pass away – but art persists’,” the artist said.
Glaschiot said he had also been in contact with people in Hong Kong making 3D scans of the sculpture to produce miniature versions. – AFP, October 13, 2021
