A 19-year-old man was arrested Sunday for spray painting a Taiwan replica of a monument commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre that had been on display since June 4 at Liberty Square in downtown Taipei.
The man surnamed Lee (?) told police he vandalized the sculpture to vent his anger over the financial difficulties and general hardships he was facing because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Taipei-based New School for Democracy, which built the sculpture — a Pillar of Shame replica — through a fundraising campaign condemned the act and demanded that those responsible be held accountable.
The group reported the case to a police station in Zhongshan District in Taipei at about 9:30 a.m. and about six hours later, the police arrested Lee, who was caught on a surveillance camera spray painting the sculpture, according to the police.
Lee confessed to his involvement in the case and blamed it on anger over hardships due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the police.
According to their initial findings, the police said Lee had previously violated the Social Order Maintenance Law but that he was not affiliated with a political party or a criminal gang, without providing any further details.
Tseng Chien-yuan (???), the group’s chairman, was not convinced, however, saying it was not the first time people have acted to sabotage the annual Tiananmen Square Massacre commemoration.
Event organizers in the past have reported similar acts of vandalism to police, which were then treated as an expression of freedom of speech and handled as civil cases that were settled privately, Tseng noted.
The acts are significant, however, because they could scare Taiwanese off from highlighting the Tiananmen Square incident and issues facing the Chinese Communist Party.
“Once Taiwanese do not speak up, no one in the Chinese community will speak,” Tseng said.
He believed that the acts of vandalism are being directed by somebody behind the scenes, and urged the government to find out who that person is “so that the spiritual freedom of Taiwanese will not be threatened.”
The Taipei work is patterned after the Pillar of Shame, a series of sculptures by Danish artist Jens Galschiøt memorializing the loss of life during specific events in history.
An eight-meter-high sculpture remembering the victims of the Tiananmen Square crackdown at the University of Hong Kong in 1997 was dismantled and removed on Dec. 22, 2021 amid a broader clampdown on democracy and anti-China symbols in Hong Kong.
Authorized by Galschiøt, the Taipei-based group built a replica of the Pillar of Shame and unveiled it on June 4 at a commemorative vigil in Taipei on the 33rd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Tseng said.
Source: Focus Taiwan News Channel