Student Life: Amnesty International Brings Falun Gong Art Exhibit to Campus (Photo)

Student Life

Washington University in St. Louis

Issue date: 10/12/05

The Washington University chapter of Amnesty International is sponsoring a week-long art exhibit at the Gargoyle for the supporters of the Falun Gong, a spiritual practice with elements similar to Buddhism and Taoism that was started in China in 1992 by Li Hongzhi. The exhibit will run on Wednesday and Thursday between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m.

Students check out the Falun Gong art exhibit in the Gargoyle. The week-long exhibit was sponsored by the University's chapter of Amnesty International.

In 1999, the former president of the Communist Party of China Jiang Zemin ordered a suppression of Falun Gong by means of state media criticism and a police crackdown on members of the group. As of this year, the Falun Dafa Information Center has reported 2,676 deaths of members, thousands of detentions, and more than 30,000 documented cases of persecution at the hands of the Chinese police.

The exhibit features paintings depicting the ideals of Falun Gong, as well as graphic scenes of torture, murder and imprisonment of practitioners by Chinese government agents. It will remain in St. Louis until the beginning of November.

"We find [the exhibit] is a very effective way to talk about Falun Gong," said Benji Katz, a sophomore and co-president of the University's Amnesty International chapter.

Much of the featured art is infused with religious themes-many of the people depicted have halos, and other common features in the paintings include cherubs and Buddhist symbolism.

"You see Jesus and Buddha, and the way that they're figured is similar. The exhibit is in no way religious; it is to educate about human rights abuses," said junior Kevin Pirrish, a co-president of the University's Amnesty International chapter.

St. Louis Falun Gong practitioners were the ones who approached the University's Amnesty International chapter about displaying the exhibit in the Gargoyle.

Kairong Tian, a protein biochemist at Monsanto and Falun Gong practitioner, emigrated from China years ago. She visited the exhibit on Monday.

"Right now I cannot visit China. They will definitely put me in jail," said Tian. "They monitor my phone calls to my parents and my brothers...The security there talked to my parents, talked to my father in China. My husband doesn't practice, but he supports me. When he visited [China], he was detained by the authorities, and they talked to him about me."

On Tuesday night, Huagui Lui, a Chinese immigrant living in St. Louis, spoke at the University about her experience living eight months in a reeducation camp for her Falun Gong affiliation in 1999. Before her arrest, she was a high school math teacher for 30 years in Hunan Province.

"I really enjoyed the lightness of mind the practice gave me, and my health also improved," said Lui. "The police tried to pour into my head all these slanderous things about Falun Gong. I started a hunger strike and a group of men forced feeding tubes into my nose. I had to renounce my beliefs and confess, and I felt regretful and humiliated."

Her sentence was reduced by four months in return for her confession.

Falun Gong claims to have 100 million [practitioners] worldwide, with 70 million in China, [...] They refer to themselves as a spiritual "cultivation practice" in their literature...

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