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BEIJING — A prominent arts center in Beijing has canceled a Chinese-American artist’s exhibition of works with strong social and historical themes, planned for December, after the local authorities declined to issue the necessary import permits. The cancellation comes amid a growing clampdown on civil society across the country and rising tensions between China and the United States.
China’s censorship review process is notoriously opaque and there was no official reason given for withholding the permits. In a letter to lenders of the works announcing the cancellation, Philip Tinari, director of the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, said that after months of back and forth with the local cultural authorities, the gallery was suddenly informed this month that the approvals would not be coming.
“Topics that were once relatively open for discussion are now increasingly scrutinized,” Mr. Tinari wrote in the letter, which was seen by The New York Times. “An exhibition that might have been greenlighted a few years ago — such as this one — must now be canceled.”
Her work can be overtly political, like a series of pencil sketches titled “Where Is Mao?” But the 30-plus paintings that had been proposed for the Beijing show focused more on questions of culture, gender, history and memory.
In an interview, Ms. Liu said that the local authorities had initially raised concerns about nine works, including a 1993 self-portrait based on a photograph of the artist as a young, rifle-toting woman at the end of the Cultural Revolution, the decade-long period of political tumult that rocked China under Mao Zedong, and a 1988 painting, “Abacus,” or “Seven-Up Eight-Down” in Chinese — a common phrase that is often used to describe the state of feeling agitated.
“Maybe they felt like it was a comment on the current state of China,” said Ms. Liu, speaking by telephone from her home in Oakland, Calif.
Another work in question was a 2011 painting of 12 schoolgirls in uniforms wearing gas masks, which Ms. Liu said was originally based on a historical photograph of an air raid drill during World War II.
“The message is antiwar so I thought it was O.K., but when I talked with my Chinese artist friends about it, they just said one word: Hong Kong,” Ms. Liu said.
In recent months, images of gas masks — particularly as worn by students — have become widely associated with the antigovernment protests that have convulsed Hong Kong since June and angered the authorities in Beijing, who see the demonstrations as a direct challenge to their rule in the semiautonomous territory.
Ms. Liu said that after the authorities voiced objections, she reluctantly agreed to withdraw the nine works in question from the show. What remained was still a “pretty strong show,” she said, including a large-scale installation of 250,000 fortune cookies piled atop train tracks — a reference to the nuggets of gold that lured a wave of Chinese immigrants to America in the 19th century, many of whom later went on to build the country’s first Transcontinental Railroad.
The final show would also have included some of Ms. Liu’s more recent works, based on the Depression-era photographs of Dorothea Lange as well as some works that had been exhibited in China before, like a painting of a Chinese mother and daughter pulling a barge upstream.
But in a sign of the fast-shrinking space for expression in China, the authorities decided in the end to effectively kill the show altogether by refusing to issue the approvals required to import the remaining works.
“I was so sad and disappointed,” Ms. Liu said. “Of course my work has political dimensions, but my focus is really the human faces, the human struggle, the epic journey.”
“I sincerely feel like all I’m doing is enshrining the anonymous working class who never had a voice,” added Ms. Liu, who will be the subject of a retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington in 2021.
The show’s cancellation, which was first reported by The Art Newspaper, is a setback for the UCCA, which is coming off the huge success of a major exhibition of works by Pablo Picasso and its recent announcement of plans to open an outpost in Shanghai.
It is also the latest indication of how China’s turn toward a more hard-nosed authoritarianism under the leadership of Xi Jinping has crept into all corners of society. While censorship has been a source of frustration in China’s cultural sectors for years, most knew generally where the so-called red lines were and how to avoid them.
But many now say the red line of censorship has been moving, a point that was illustrated most vividly over the summer when the opening of a big-budget Chinese patriotic movie — of the sort typically beloved by the authorities — was abruptly canceled.
Last year, several artworks that raised questions about the social and ethical implications of artificial intelligence and biotechnology were pulled at the last second from an exhibition on orders of the authorities in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong. More recently, the opening of the Pompidou Center in Shanghai was tainted by the revelation that the esteemed French cultural institution had agreed to censor several works in its inaugural show at the request of the authorities.
Ms. Liu, who was sent to do manual labor in the countryside for four years during the Cultural Revolution, said the cancellation of her show was a reminder not to take progress for granted.
“Chinese contemporary art over the past 25 years has reflected an opening up of speech in China, and a meaningful dialogue with the world,” she said. “That openness is now beginning to feel like a dream.”
