China hides Danish sculpture as artist’s friends receive prison sentences

Three Hong Kong activists have been sentenced to between five and seven years in prison after holding memorial events at Danish artist Jens Galschiøt’s sculpture “Pillar of Shame”, DR reports. The eight-metre monument remains stored in a container in Hong Kong.

“My friends in Hong Kong have been imprisoned for washing, caring for and displaying it. I have fought to get them released ever since they were jailed. It is unreasonable,” Galschiøt said.

“Pillar of Shame” stood outside a university in Hong Kong from 1997. The sculpture honours those killed in the 1989 crackdown on demonstrators at Tiananmen Square in Beijing and depicts 50 twisted bodies.

Activists from Hong Kong’s democracy movement traditionally washed the sculpture each year to commemorate the victims. They were arrested in 2021, when the sculpture was also removed from the university grounds. It was damaged during the removal.

Public memorials for those killed in the protests were banned after China imposed a new national security law in Hong Kong in 2020.

DR’s Asia correspondent, Philip Roin, said the Tiananmen Square massacre remains one of the most sensitive periods in recent Chinese history.

“Every year, Chinese people are reminded of it on the anniversary of the massacre, when the internet is subject to additional censorship. The entire episode is too difficult for the Communist Party to ‘rewrite’, as it often does with dark details in history, because the documentation of what happened then is so extensive,” he said.

Up to one million people gathered at Tiananmen Square in Beijing during several weeks in April 1989, demanding greater freedom of expression, less censorship and more political openness. On June 3 and 4, troops moved into the square, shooting, running over and arresting demonstrators.

The number of people killed remains disputed. China’s government said in 1989 that 200 civilians had died, while documents that emerged in 2017 from a former British ambassador to China indicated that at least 10,000 people were killed. Several parties have assessed that several thousand is a realistic estimate.

Galschiøt has since campaigned for the activists’ release and for the sculpture to be returned to Denmark.