How Tiananmen shaped the new-age art of protesting

The first time Effy Sun chanted slogans was as a three-year-old girl in Beijing in 1989, at the height of the Tiananmen protest movement. "I was too young to know anything," the Beijing student of film-making, who now studies in Hong Kong, told DNA. "My mother recalls that whenever she took me to Tiananmen Square, where demonstrators gathered and Beijing residents went to watch, I would repeat their slogans."

But growing up in mainland China, where Communist Party propaganda has blinded the post-1980s generation to that defining moment in China's contemporary history, Sun says she "never heard anything more about June 4".

Last week, in Hong Kong, Sun walked into an exhibition of a post-1980s generation's artistic commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the student-led movement. It was, she says, "an eye-opener… When I was in Beijing, I used to think that Chinese society is perfect. I now realise that my country isn't perfect… In a sense, being in Hong Kong has made me politically conscious."

For Kobe Ho Ting-ting, 27, that's the kind of response that validates the art initiative she and her peers have started. "When we were young, we didn't understand what happened in Tiananmen," says Ho, who co-founded 'P-at-riot: June 4th Cultural Festival of Post-80s Generation'. "But now we're about the same age as the student protesters were 20 years ago, and we want to remember the students' ideals and their courage to 'speak truth to power'."

But rather than go through the annual ritual of June 4 candlelight vigils in Hong Kong, P-at-riot members are organising a series of events — rock concerts, exhibitions, movie screenings, and reading sessions — that hold greater appeal for the post-80s generation. "We don't want to bear the burden of the deaths; we want to celebrate their lives and ideals," says Ho.

At the art exhibition, curator Lee Chun-fung, 25, points to an exhibit that uses Lego building bricks to depict an "alternative, happy ending to the protests by imagining what might have been if the government had not responded with force". Here, military tanks aren't knocking the statue of the Goddess of Democracy that students put up in the square: they are preserving it. And students aren't going on a hunger strike, they are having a 'pizza party' along with Chinese troops!

"For us youngsters, June 4 isn't a complicated concept, and we're expressing our understanding of it from an alternative perspective," says Lee.

Just then, a Chinese couple, with their young son, walks into the art exhibition. The child, of about three, runs straight up to the eye-catching Lego exhibit. Holding him in her arms, the mother explains in simple terms what happened on June 4, 1989. Even if concepts like democracy are too complicated for a three-year-old, one thing is for sure: the memory of the Tiananmen movement is being passed on to another generation.