Imani Simmons

Apollo English

Mr. Ward

November 18th, 2021

My topic is the controlled human rights of China, and the depths of how it affects the people, the

hold the government has, and why tragedies are censored. My painting represents human rights

tragedies surrounded by pictures of the actual events to help capture the truth of what happens

in China.

The blue-toned picture is a poem "Thoughts on a Still Night" by Li Bai, famous in Chinese poetry

for his romantic view of life. I chose this poem because it represents homesickness and can

represent sadness which is the exact tone of voice I wanted to convey in my painting. The poem

is the following:

"Before my bed, the moon is shining bright,

I think that it is frost upon the ground.

I raise my head and look at the bright moon,

I lower my head and think of home."

When creating this painting, I decided to blackout the background where certain words of the

poem would be as I layered them over top. Over the black, I wrote the phrases “Before my”,”the

moon is”, “I think that it is”, “I raise my head and”, and “Home”.

The meaning of this painting is to show the number of words that get censored out in Chinese

media, which fits into the theme of the painting. I censored these phrases to contribute to the

theme of censorship in china and to tie into other pieces of the full painting. The color blue

represents sadness in the color wheel, I decided to incorporate this into my painting. The white
around the piece circulates the innocence of the people. Along with the color scheme, the figure

in the middle has a scared expression on his face with tape over his mouth that says ‘redacted’.

This goes along with the censorship of internment camps, after letting someone go, these

camps silence any victims that try to speak out on any abuse in the jails.

The painting in green has many more hidden messages in the poem. The poem chosen

is "Traveling again" by Du Fu, another famous Chinese poet. The bold represents the parts of

the poem I kept before cutting the rest off. The original poem is

"I remember the temple, this route I’ve traveled before,

I recall the bridge as I cross it again.

It seems the hills and rivers have been waiting,

The flowers and willows all are selfless now.

The field is sleek and vivid, thin mist shines,

On soft sand, the sunlight’s color shows it’s late.

All the traveler’s sorrow fades away,

What better place to rest than this?"

The reason I cut the rest of the poem off after "Waiting" is to show suspense. This is also why I

added an ellipsis at the end. I completed the same process of layering black over where words

will go before writing them to create the redacted look. This theme is of locations and

landmarks, I did this because this painting has the theme of a black jail. In China, black jails are

hidden behind the government and in various places. No location of any jail or site is allowed to

be disclosed or any memories of it. This is why I layered black under the words “I remember”

“route”, “bridge”, “hills”, and “rivers”. The color shift of lime green is supposed to represent the

spotlight used in regular jails, to give it more of a warden look. For the poem, I added many

pauses and ellipses to show hesitance when the narrator is speaking. The reason is when
released from these sites, victims don’t want to speak out about their story, thinking they’ll get

put back in. These combinations of greens and blues represent greed and sadness. This is

because it has been thought that the companies running these jails are paid by the government

to do these things. The wire gate represents how these jails are inescapable along with the

treatment of the people there

The third piece is about the Tiananmen Square massacre in China. The poem is called

“Wu” meaning fog. This is made by an anonymous poet who calls himself Arlu. Like the last

poem, The bold represents the parts of the poem I kept before cutting the rest off and the

underlined is what has the black layer underneath.

“In fact, I am scared. I cannot see your face hidden in the fog.

Even in the past, for example, when I was nine,

I never thought of fog as bad weather,

even after seeing on TV a sturdy tank driving out from a veil of fog,

I wait silently in the fog, believing that the sun will come out, believing that the flowers

will still be there, and you too will still be there, after the fog has dispersed.”

This poem is made about the Tiananmen Square incident, I cut the beginning off to create

suspense. This massacre is a large part of Chinese history that is widely censored. I created the

black box around “fog” and “and you too will still be there, after the fog has dispersed” to show

how China handled the protesters.

The CCP, (Chinese communist party) doesn’t acknowledge what happened on June 4th, 1989.

In the media, it has been said that all the protesters went home safely, or charged the military

with force when there is evidence that it was a lie. In the picture, there are protesters with

orange-yellow hues. These colors mean anxiety, uncertainty, and instability, but also mean

intellect, behind them is the Chinese flag.