December 3, 2002 Tuesday Final Edition

Zhang Cuiying stands at a table lined with fabric flowers and paints lipstick-red petals onto a sheet of rice paper stretched out in front of her.

She is a small, quiet woman from Australia and an internationally acclaimed artist, whose paintbrush has caressed the face of Buddha and stroked the hair of the goddess of mercy.

But her life hasn't been tranquil. It's been marred by an eight-month imprisonment in China where she was tortured, beaten, shackled and humiliated for practicing Falun Gong, a spirituality-through-exercise movement. "It was painful," said Zhang of her imprisonment, while she sat in her art exhibition at the University of Alberta's Dinwoodie Lounge, her Mandarin words translated by Chunyan Huang.

During those months in 1999 and 2000, Zhang was forced to sleep beside the only toilet in her cell, her body oozing with infection. Her legs were trampled by other inmates, who were instructed to hurt her if she attempted to meditate. Her head was beaten with rolled-up newspapers. She had to drink water out of the toilet, shower in front of male inmates and stand barefoot outside in the middle of winter.

"I felt dizzy all day," she said. "The police weren't sympathetic. They said, if you die, you die like a dog. They beat me. There were bruises all over my body and leaking blisters. I didn't see anybody die in the place where I was, but thousands of Falun Gong practitioners have died."

The spiritual movement was banned in 1999 [due to jealousy of Chinese dictator Jiang].

Zhang, 40, was a skeptic before she began practicing in 1996 in Australia. She was suffering from arthritis, its pain crippling her hands and joints and making painting all but impossible. Her husband, a taxi driver who had moved to Australia in 1989 before the Tiananmen Square massacre, invited her to a free Falun Gong seminar. Within a month, her arthritis was gone, Zhang said.

So she traveled to Beijing, where she was soon arrested, to share her story and fight the persecution of other practitioners.

"In China, we have a saying: If you have benefited, you return in larger amount," she said. "I wanted to help my Master Li," the founder of Falun Gong.

Since her rescue by the Australian government, she has been banned from her country of birth and has lost all contact with her parents.

Zhang uses her rice paper paintings, and the poems in calligraphy accompanying them, to express her faith and tell the world how Falun Gong practitioners are treated in China.

"When I was at an art exhibition in Italy, someone said my paintings look like sacred paintings," Zhang said. "People say, when they see my pictures, they don't want to conduct any bad behaviors. My pictures have a kind of energy which shines full of truthfulness and kindness. It's like a piece of music. It can educate people and change people."

She said her paintings capture the contrast between brutal persecution -- captured in the sad eyes of her characters -- and transcendental beauty, seen in the ink-and-brush mountain sketches.

"By traveling around the world, I want to educate a small group of people," Zhang said. "Let's oppose the terrorism together. Let the Chinese people have the basic human rights, the right to believe and practice the truth, compassion and tolerance."

VIEWING HOURS

You can see Zhang Cuiying's exhibit, entitled The Golden Brush, today only at the Dinwoodie Lounge in the Students' Union Building at the University of Alberta. It's open from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.

You can also visit www.zhangcuiying.org for a sneak peek.

GRAPHIC: Photo: Candace Elliott, The Journal; Zhang Cuiying hopes her paintings, on display at the University of Alberta, foster compassion and tolerance.