Pure Freedom

2012, Oil on Linen, 100 x 100cm
Finalist, Redland Art Awards 2012

The China of 1989 was a very different country to the China of today. Visiting my sister (who was doing her PhD in Beijing), we stayed in the university dorms. Everyone still wore Mao suits. There were bike jams, not traffic jams. The uni walls contained bullet holes. And the footpaths of nearby streets were occupied by billiard tables.

Throughout the day, old men would take their pet birds for a “walk”, slowly carrying ornate wooden cages down the street. Hanging the cages in the trees, they would play a few rounds of outdoor pool with their mates, then walk their birds home again.

That these birds were outside and in trees yet still caged seemed representative of lives of so many of us. Somehow it seems worse to be able to glimpse freedom and not experience it than to not see it at all.