24-hour performance in Prague highlights fight for freedom in China

Prague, Oct 11 (CTK) – Hong Kong Artist Wai Ting Loretta Lau is presenting her Memory Eraser performance, in which she is inside a two-metre cube in a square in the city centre for 24 hours, to point to the importance of freedom and violation of democracy and human rights in China and anywhere else.

Her performance started in the Vaclav Havel Square between the old and new buildings of the National Theatre at 20:00 on Thursday.

The cube is covered with a white cloth and four projectors are showing images from historical events – the 1968 Prague Spring reform movement, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing, the 1989 Czechoslovak Velvet Revolution, and the 2019 Hong Kong protests.

The artist is watching the images, trying to erase them with a white brush, same as the political regimes try to erase people’s memories. She wants to show that the more the regime wants to cover the memories, the more its sins can be seen.

Loretta Lau had her first Memory Eraser performance in Prague’s DOX contemporary art centre to mark the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, in which Chinese soldiers killed more than a thousand of demonstrating students in June 1989.

This brutal action ended the efforts to make China more democratic. People in Hong Kong, a Chinese territory with a special administration, have been demonstrating for a more democratic political system for several months.

The year of 1989 was a big victory for Czech people after the 1968 military invasion and Soviet occupation of the country, but not for Chinese people, Loretta Lau says. People must not lose their hunger for freedom, she says.

Loretta Lau is studying visual arts at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague (UMPRUM).

kva/dr/hol