May 6, 2003, Tuesday

It is difficult to see how anyone could object to Zhang Cuiying's painting, One Hundred Koalas, which is due to go on display at the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow this week. As its title suggests, it is simply a picture of koala bears - 100 of them, all in a row. So why has the Chinese government been trying to stop this work and others like it from being exhibited in galleries across Europe in the last few months? It's not the koalas that China's ruling Communist Party has a problem with, but the artist who painted them. Born and educated in China, but now an Australian citizen, Zhang Cuiying is a practitioner of Falun Gong - a spiritual movement outlawed in China since 1999. [...]

A professional artist for many years, Zhang began to suffer from severe arthritis in 1996. Unable to paint and barely able to walk, there appeared to be little conventional doctors could do to help. But then Zhang decided to try using the five basic positions of Falun Gong to ease the pain in her joints. The results exceeded all her expectations and in just five weeks she was cured. She came to believe so strongly in the health-giving properties of the exercises that when she heard Falun Gong had been outlawed, she decided to appeal to the Chinese government.

On 5 March 2000, Zhang was in Beijing to lobby the People's Congress when police stopped her and searched her bag. Discovering her letter of appeal to the then prime minister, Zhu Rongji, they arrested her on the spot. She spent the next eight months in prison. "I was beaten and thrown into male jail cells," she says "and while I showered, male inmates and policemen watched and tried to humiliate me."

Finally, after intervention from the Australian Government, Zhang was allowed to return home. She believes that if she hadn't been an Australian citizen her fate could have been a lot worse. According to Amnesty International, more than 350 Falun Gong practitioners have died in custody in China since 1999.

Once she recovered from her ordeal, Zhang decided to use her art as a means of raising awareness of the plight of the Falun Gong practitioners in China. So far, she has visited 150 cities in 40 countries, exhibiting her paintings and telling her story.

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