Member of Parliament Keith Locke Speaks at Zhang Cuiying Art Opening in New Zealand Parliament Building

(Clearwisdom.net)

August 8, 2002

I am so glad to be hosting this art exhibition that has been touring the country over the past week. I was very glad to do so on two counts. When I saw the material, it was very good artwork and would do justice to being in this building. It has proven to be the case and people have been moving through since this morning and everyone has been very impressed with the art work so it has really fulfilled its purpose. The staff has come and then some of the MP's themselves, and now the general public and school kids are coming through to see it. So that has been very good. And as an artist myself I really welcome Zhang Cuiying here today.

The other reason was that most artists and certainly all great artists are motivated by something - appreciation of the environment, social justice and so on. And in our country we have artists, Colin McLaren working in this way, motivated by belief and this artist is motivated by her beliefs too. In this exhibition with the paintings available we chose to show the history of this artist and some of the critical times she went through when she went to China. As a Falun Gong practitioner she was arrested and thrown into jail for eight months, like a lot of other Falun Gong practitioners had been unfortunately, before her. Thanks to international efforts she was released from prison and is once again producing wonderful art. So it's truly great to be with an artist who is producing such art after those experiences.

The other reason I was interested to host this exhibition was that there has been an unfortunate sequence of events in New Zealand, where people in authority have bowed down to pressure from the Chinese government and have imported a certain repressive approach of the Chinese government into New Zealand, that was first introduced to this country when in 1999 our police moved demonstrators so that they were not in the view of the visiting Chinese Premier. This led to many inquiries, which criticized the police action and certain changes I understand have been made to these procedures. But there were two subsequent incidents which were rather disturbing, one of which the Auckland City Council took down a banner publishing the Dalai Lama's speech at Eden Park, which was a very large speech as it turned out and the Chinese government was a bit upset about that banner being across the street. Subsequent to that the Auckland Airport management pulled down a Falun Gong poster which was up in the airport and of which there is a copy of that here: not a political poster in any way - just a Falun Gong poster and there was a lot of protest and talk in the community about that from people including myself. And this is the first time an authority and an authority running our biggest airport would do such a thing, would undermine our freedom of expression, so I was quite keen in the political heart in New Zealand - in Parliament Building - that we assert our right to artistic freedom and I think we have done that here today.