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CHINA. Beijing. April to June 1989. Tiananmen Square massacre.

The Tiananmen Square protests were student-led demonstrations in Beijing in 1989. The students called for democracy, greater accountability, freedom of the press, and freedom of speech, though they were loosely organised and their goals varied. At the height of the protests, about a million people would assemble in the Square (see picture 2). The protests were forcibly suppressed after the government declared martial law. In what became widely known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre, troops with assault rifles and tanks killed unarmed civilians trying to block the military’s advance towards Tiananmen Square. The number of civilian deaths has been estimated at anywhere between hundreds and thousands.

Public memory of the Tiananmen Square protests has been suppressed by the authorities since 1989. Textbooks have little, if any, information related to the protests. Print media containing reference to the protests must be consistent with the government’s version of events. Following the protests, officials also banned controversial films and books, and shut down a large number of newspapers. Within a year, 12 percent of all newspapers, 8 percent of publishing companies, 13 percent of social science periodicals and more than 150 films were banned or shut down.

Currently, many Chinese citizens are reluctant to speak about the protests because of potential repercussions. Many young people born after 1980 are completely unfamiliar with the events and are apathetic about politics while older intellectuals no longer aspire for political change and instead focus on economic issues. Youth in China are generally unaware of the events that took place, of the symbols such as tank man (see last picture), or of the significance of the date June 4 itself. The entire surface of Tiananmen Square was later resurfaced, to remove evidence of blood stains left there after the crackdown. 

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In The Mood For Love (2000) dir. Wong Kar Wai

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Culture du fraisier dans l’est du Canada

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ESTEFANIA LORET DE MOLA : our lives are inherently in a state of constant transition.

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H E ’ S H E R E !

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im going to fucking die

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Grannies around 100 years old appeared in Vogue 2020. They are so beautiful just like flowers.

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Frida Kahlo (Mexican, 1907–1954) – Las dos Fridas, 1939. Oil on canvas.

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“When Van Gogh was a young man in his early twenties, he was in London studying to be a clergyman. He had no thought of being an artist at all. he sat in his cheap little room writing a letter to his younger brother in Holland, whom he loved very much. He looked out his window at a watery twilight, a thin lamppost, a star, and he said in his letter something like this: “it is so beautiful I must show you how it looks.” And then on his cheap ruled note paper, he made the most beautiful, tender, little drawing of it. When I read this letter of Van Gogh’s it comforted me very much and seemed to throw a clear light on the whole road of Art. Before, I thought that to produce a work of painting or literature, you scowled and thought long and ponderously and weighed everything solemnly and learned everything that all artists had ever done aforetime, and what their influences and schools were, and you were extremely careful about *design* and *balance* and getting *interesting planes* into your painting, and avoided, with the most astringent severity, showing the faintest *academical* tendency, and were strictly modern. And so on and so on. But the moment I read Van Gogh’s letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it. And Van Gogh’s little drawing on the cheap note paper was a work of art because he loved the sky and the frail lamppost against it so seriously that he made the drawing with the most exquisite conscientiousness and care.”

— Brenda Ueland, from “If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit”

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Book Store, Naka-meguro 中目黒

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I feel like I just watched a whole movie

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