Badiucao: Art, power and China

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the Apartment Bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. I am Nina Khrushcheva, the great-granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union in 1962.

0:47And I'm Max Kennedy, the nephew of US President John F. Kennedy. We explore what was a terrifying moment in history. The story of the Cuban Missile Crisis. How close the world came to nuclear war. And what they had to do to pull it back. from the brink. The bomb, Kennedy and Khrushchev. All episodes available now, wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

1:13Welcome to Hard Talk from the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. In early adulthood, my guest today made a life-changing choice which cut him off from his family and homeland for the foreseeable future. He's known as Badiutsal. It's not his real name, but that is something he chooses not to use. He was born in Shanghai to a family tainted in the eyes of the Communist Party by a dissident past, in particular a grandfather who was a screenwriter condemned to hard labour under Chairman Mao. In the 1990s, Badi Yudsao saw a clandestine copy of a documentary film detailing the massacre of student protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

1:58In 2009, he got permission to study in Australia. He left and never came back. He began drawing political cartoons, lampooning Chinese Communist Party propaganda, and he built an audience and a reputation both in Australia and far beyond. In 2018, he learned that the Chinese authorities knew his real identity. Family members in China were being threatened and Badi Yutsao faced a choice. stop his creative career in order to protect his family or continue. Ultimately, he chose the latter. He cut all contact with family to protect them and a year later revealed his identity in an Australian TV documentary.

2:43Since then, his international reputation has grown. He's had exhibitions in Australia and a host of European cities, but he feels that too many major galleries and museums, especially in Australia, choose not to feature his work for fear of upsetting the Chinese government. He's also catalogued a series of incidents which he says suggest the Chinese authorities are out to intimidate him, if not worse. His latest work is a graphic novel depicting a future conflict between the US and China over Taiwan. He says he will never trade being truthful to himself and his art for security. But how does insecurity impact his creativity?

3:25Well, he joins me now on the line from Taipei. Badi Yudhsou, welcome to Hard Talk. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. It's a pleasure to talk to you. Now, you are an internationally renowned illustrator and artist today, but your subject matter by and large is deeply political. So to what extent does politics fuel all of your art? Well, I think you cannot really separate art from politics. For me, I grew up in a country which is heavily polluted by politics all the time. I believe that artists' expressions need to be truthful to our lives. And as a China-born artist, that my family history, what my experience is loaded by the shadow of Beijing's political persecution and other threats.

4:16So for me, naturally, I want to engage my expression in art with the politics. It is only a very natural product. Is it to the exclusion of all else? I mean, if you just felt a sort of desire to paint or draw something intensely beautiful that didn't really have a political message, would you actually, in a sense, censor yourself? Because what you are after is always a political content, a political message. Does it go that far? Well, I think we have to see it slightly separately because one thing is about the subject choosing. The other thing is the process of making art. As an artist, we have to pay very attention to our life and be truthful to our experience.

4:58That is why I would always focusing on those political events or human rights records from China, because that's the thing that I care the most. But while the process of creating art, to create an image, to grasp the essence of basic human emotion within those very different time or occasion, That's a pure artistic process for creation. Right now you're sitting in Taipei and you have a new graphic novel coming out, a collaboration with a writer in which you illustrate what is a sort of dystopian near future where an authoritarian United States is at war with an authoritarian China over Taiwan.

5:40And it plays out with young people having to make very difficult choices about what they do in this context. Have you done your work on that particular graphic novel with an international audience in mind, or do you hope that somehow or other the content of this work reaches particularly young people inside China? Well, I do hope it can reach as many different groups in the world as possible. Of course, this work has a lot to reference in what happened in China, in Hong Kong, in Taiwan. It is a dedication for those people in those countries who are bravely fighting for their rights. But more importantly, I think visual art is always something that trying to build a bridge between different culture and language, because visual language does not have this difficulty.

6:31What I really want to achieve through this very particular form of graphic novel or comics, you may call it, is to approach to the younger generation, especially for Gen Z and teenagers that talking about human rights sometimes can be too serious and not appealing to the younger generation but comics or manga or graphic novel has this magic has this language just talking to our younger generation and that is why i want to use this media to talking about those difficulty issues but also make it cool make it cool i mean far from regarding it as cool what the Chinese authorities clearly see in your work is something treasonous.

7:10You know, they portray you as a guy who has sold out China to foreign interests. You're anti-China, according to Beijing. And I just wonder when you take on topics like the future of Taiwan, just as you take on topics like the corrupt authoritarian rule of the Chinese Communist Party led by Xi Jinping, whether you actually believe a lot of Chinese people might buy the official line that you are selling out China? I always want to make it very clear there's a difference between the China's Communist Party and China and Chinese people or Chinese population. I am a China-born artist. My root is there.

7:50All my growing up time is from China. I have very deep connection and love to this land, to its people who are living on this land. So to me, to telling the true side of China, to pointing out the problem of the Chinese government is my way to express my love to China, to the Chinese people on this land. Quite in a contrast that I always be putting into a position as if I'm anti-China. That is only because the Chinese Communist Party is good at mixing or misleading the very different notion between people, land, and the regime. Just a thought about the style you use. Some of the images you create are a little reminiscent to me of work done by the UK street artist Banksy in that you are subvertive in a way.

8:41You subvert almost cliched images and change their meaning. and you also poke fun and use humour when you're challenging, for example, President Xi Jinping. And there's one very well-known piece of yours where you characterise Xi Jinping with a shotgun, having, it seems, according to the image, just shot dead Winnie the Pooh. And Winnie the Pooh, of course, in recent times in China has sort of become a sort of symbolic meme associated with Xi Jinping. Was that your sort of humorous way of saying it's easy to get under Xi Jinping's skin, you know, this idea that he has to shoot Winnie the Pooh?

9:18Well, I think it's very important to making work fun, but also using this satire to pointing out a dictator is not a god, just a motto, just an individual person that can be criticized like any one of us in the society. But also the use of being for me particularly is very important to actually using a weapon to defeat the censorship in China. And here's how it works. When you kind of successfully making a very political taboo image, braged or connecting with a very popular image like online, I mean, like winning the boost, then you're certainly creating a huge difficulty for China's censorship.

9:59Because if they forbidden the image, then public ask questions. why our beloved yellow bear is no longer online. And then if they choose not to do it, then my message embedded in those means popular images get its life longer in China and reach to more people. The Chinese government, perhaps more than any other government in the world, is extremely adept at information control, at surveillance, at ensuring that the Chinese population does not see things that the Chinese government doesn't want it to see. So what's your knowledge of whether or not people inside your homeland are able to see your work?

10:38I do have great confidence that there are a large amount of people from China can find their way, whether they're using VPN or other methodology, to going around the censorship system, the so-called the Great Fire War on internet of China. There are a lot of people are using social media, like Twitter or Instagram or Facebook. Maybe some of them are just there to check in the Hollywood stars or K-pop. But in the same time, they're also opening the door to the free world, to letting information like my artworks to be, you know, finding the window to reach them. It works with multiple layers of audience as well, because the methodology that I use is I always try to make my art accessible without any copyright issues.

11:31Yeah, but it's a risk, isn't it? I mean, you mustn't be very aware that if people inside China download your images, even look at your images, they run the risk of arrest and imprisonment. So I just wonder how you feel about that. It is difficult. It is never easy to seeing people that getting into trouble with my images. But it's also very necessary that getting those information spreaded because we have to understand to knowing there are people outside of China have the capacity to criticize Xi Jinping is also a very powerful moment for the people inside of China. When people live in China, they don't really have a voice.

12:13When they see there are artists or journalists or storytellers try to tell their stories that they cannot speak up inside of China, it is also an important experience for them. How did you find your way to become an artist dissident? You were a child of the post Tiananmen era. You were brought up in a China where it was forbidden to even reference what happened in 1989. And yet you clearly developed a consciousness that was deeply rebellious toward the Communist Party and its way of running your country. Where did that come from? I would say it's half of the family history because my great parents, they were actually the first group of filmmakers in China being active in 1930s until they get into trouble in 1957 with the Hundred Blossom movement.

13:03My grandpa died in the movement and this family trauma has been pathing on me and telling me that there's something wrong with this regime that I cannot buy 100 % of its propaganda. But surely, if I may interrupt, surely the lesson of your grandfather was that it was extraordinarily dangerous to use creativity in a way that challenged the authority of the party and the state. I mean, didn't your own parents warn you off rebellion, certainly artistic rebellion? Oh, they did. And they did it when I was a teenage. And naturally, I think regardless of Chinese teenage or British teenage, we rebel when we're underage.

13:41I think it's only human nature for young people to seek freedom. them. Did your dad tell you that, you know, you absolutely should not pursue a career in art? He actually did. In his own quote, he would rather me to be a barber or a sheriff instead of being an artist, because if I do that, I will never lose my job. But being an artist is a dangerous choice. Bottom line is you got the opportunity to study in Australia. You took it and you decided to stay. and I guess that decision was tied to your decision to go into creativity. You began drawing, cartooning and very soon you had success but I just wonder whether as you had that success there was a part of you that also felt a deep sense of loss because you were burning your bridges very quickly with your homeland and with your family.

14:30Indeed because I become a poison to my family because what I did for my art that a lot of prizes are actually paid by my family back in China when they got visited and interrogated by the Chinese National Security Police. But I think what I'm doing is something that I truly believe in. And if there's no one is trying to make the truth outside of China, letting more people to know the situation will never change. And the suffer will not just remain to my family, but more family and for generations in the future. But there must have been an incredible crunch moment because, of course, you know, I've introduced to you as Bajut Cao, and that's not your real name.

15:09It's a sort of artistic name you use. You're now showing me your face, of course, and that was a decision you took about, what, five or six years ago. But there was that crunch moment when the Chinese authorities, for the first time, realized exactly who you were. I think there was an exhibition planned in Hong Kong at the time, and they made it plain that if you went ahead with that exhibition, your family would suffer. you've had to wrestle with the most difficult dilemmas both personal and artistic indeed it is a hard choice it is hard decision because clearly the police said that you're either giving up your art or you will get into trouble and your family will be in the trouble too but i always believe that you cannot exchange your freedom for safety or the other way around because once you do, you actually lose both.

16:01If you don't mind me asking a very personal question, did you get messages from inside China, from your family in Shanghai and beyond saying, please stop because if you carry on, we are in big trouble? Well, that happened in 2018 via the police threat as well. So what I do now is actually cutting my connection with anyone that I loved or cared in China because that's the only way that I can show the Chinese police that we're no longer really connected. If you want, get to me, get to me directly. Literally, do you mean you've sort of become a stranger to your own family? Indeed, indeed. That's just the hard choice that I have to make.

16:40I mean, that is one heck of a price to pay. You're absolutely right. But in the same time that I also winning support from the people who love my art, from the people who are inside of China, who sees my art as inspiration. And only through that, I can see the hope that China maybe one day can be changed. Let's talk now about the impact of your art because you've made all these sacrifices for it. And as I've said, you've won international acclaim, not just in Australia, but around the world. But what you haven't done, if I may say so, is quite emulate a guy that you've worked with and I know you know well, Ai Weiwei, who has become the kind of artist who commands the biggest stages, that is the greatest galleries and museums in the world put on his shows.

17:26You have always struggled to get that kind of recognition and access, not least in the country that you've adopted, Australia. Why is it, do you believe, that some museums and galleries are so cautious about giving you a platform? Well, it's definitely because the long reach of the Chinese government. And what it has been doing is, if I do any exhibition around the world, in Europe, in Australia, in America, certainly the Chinese government will send diplomats or emailing or calling the museum and saying it's not in their interest to having the show and it must be cancelled. It is their tactic in order to terror those institutions to not showing the work that they don't like.

18:11Do you think there's an element of cowardice in this? I mean, I know a few years ago you were very upset by the National Gallery of Victoria, which took away from you a platform that you hoped to have for a particular event. And afterward, you expressed your discontent about that. How would you characterize the decision making that you've seen? I think incidents like that is always absolutely shame for those institutions, because our institution is supposed to be the fortress that are defending the rise for expression for artists. But because of some political or financial pressures, they just caved in and not giving artists their way to speak is something a deep betray to its essence as a role for supporting artists in the first place.

18:56I mean, the gallery at the time, I just looked into it a little bit, the gallery at the time said it was, quote, unable to accommodate the security and logistics that would have been required. And I guess, you know, when China is putting pressure on, but also there is this sense that, you know, there could be some public protest, it might become controversial. Maybe it's easier for creatives running these galleries and museums just to say, you know what, thanks, but no thanks. But they are the art to facilitate. Arts need to be controversial. We are the pioneers to exploring the limitation of expression.

19:33Controversial should be some kind of a goal for the artists as well as those artistic institutions. But to me, I don't think they really fulfill their duty. Isn't there another reality here, Bajit Cao, which is that, you know, if we're talking about Australia, where you currently live, China is the country's biggest trading partner. China buys an enormous amount of Australian resources and goods and services. It's a hugely important ongoing relationship. And you're going to have to accept that in your life outside of China. maybe you have to accept that China is becoming more and more powerful, not just in economic terms, but maybe in cultural terms as well.

20:15Well, I would doubt that. Firstly, if we see what's happening in China's economy, there are so many signs that the situation is not getting good. We see the realist market is almost crumbling. We see the overcapacity of production. I think it's actually pretty unwise for Australia to continue on this old road that thinking China is still this golden goose while pumping money to Australia. Actually, China is struggling with its economy right now. But also culturally, without freedom of speech, without this activity that allowing people to express themselves freely, I don't think it's really the soil that we're having a fruitful artistic creation growing from this country.

21:03At least it's not sustainable. Yeah, I mean, but money does talk. And I think by many measures, China is now the second biggest art market in the world outside of the United States. That again is going to impact people like you. It is indeed. But what it does is not elevated the taste of making or producing or promoting more good art. What it do is rotten the entire industry and bringing down to the level of pure propaganda or nonsense. Just a personal thought. We talked about the difficulties your family has faced inside China. I mean, you've lived in Australia now for, what, 15 years or more.

21:40But I know that there are indications that still you're under surveillance. You've talked about intimidating incidents that you've experienced in Australia. Do you feel that you are truly free from the reach of the Chinese state? No, I don't think so at all, because I did experience so many incidents like being followed or a possible home invasion. And I have to talk to the Australian police time to time just for the basic security. And then don't mention all those death threats from online and a daily base. This is actually the reality that I'm living in as a decision artist. I, you know, I hesitate to say it, but it's my job.

22:22It would go away if you stopped creating the kind of art you create. Well, then my dream, Ba Diu Cao, as the artist's identity also goes away. We all need to sacrifice to pursuing our dream. And being an artist, talking about those important issues is my dream. I can't betray it. I want to end with a thought that is derived from a book that came out a short time ago. It's a really interesting book about China's underground historians and the battle for the future. That's its subtitle. It's written by a guy called Ian Johnson. And his contention is that actually writers, filmmakers, historians, artists working sort of in secret outside of the reach of the Chinese Communist Party may still be able to create a sort of a fire, a very small fire of creativity, of truth telling, which in the end can ignite something which will challenge the narrative of the Chinese Communist Party.

23:18Do you believe that? I do believe that. Well, a lot of people saying that maybe after the 1989 Tiananmen movement, there's no real protest. But what we have witnessed that happened during the white paper protests, which ending the COVID-19 kind of zero policy, is a really inspiring moment for the world to witness. It means the younger generation are more furious, are more brave than we ever imagined. And they have their language, and they have their voices and they know that taking the streets and protests would make China a different place. At least they ended the COVID policy in China. So those things does give me a lot of hope and inspiration as well.

24:03We have to end there, but Bajut Cao in Taipei, I thank you very much for joining me on Hard Talk. Thank you. Thank you. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

24:47I am Nina Khrushcheva, the great-granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union in 1962. And I'm Max Kennedy, the nephew of U.S. President John F. Kennedy. We explore what was a terrifying moment in history. The story of the Cuban Missile Crisis. How close the world came to nuclear war. And what they had to do to pull it back from the brink. The bomb, Kennedy and Khrushchev. All episodes available now, wherever you get your BBC podcasts.