The Fallout From Tian An Men Square : China’s crackdown provokes one Hong Kong-born artist to expand her vision

In the center of a blood red-colored map of China, a young man writhes as a older man holds a knife to his throat. Big black dots cover both their faces.

“This is about killing the innocent,” says Hong-Kong born artist Ming Mur-Ray as she points to the painting in her La Jolla studio, and shakes her head. “It’s about Chinese soldiers using the authority from above and killing their brothers and sisters.”

The atrocities in Tian An Men Square have led Mur-Ray, a 38-year-old artist on the rise to take a new, more personal direction in her art. She is currently involved in a show called “June 4 1989,” in which 200 artists have decorated doors to express outrage over the Chinese government’s violent suppression of the demonstrations for democracy. After a month-long stay in New York’s BlumHelman Warehouse, the show is getting ready to go on a national tour that will include a stop on the West Coast, although organizers haven’t announced it yet. She divides her time between La Jolla and another studio in New York’s SoHo.

Before her artistic turn back toward China, Mur-Ray’s work focused on mixed-medium performance pieces involving ice and fire. She painted New York rooftops and did sprawling oil landscapes. “I thought I had finished dealing with my identity crisis as an Asian artist living in the West in graduate school, a few years after I left Hong Kong in 1970,” says Mur-Ray, who came to the U.S. to study. She became an American citizen in 1980. But now, she is once again grappling with questions of identity and how she fits into a troubled world.

At first Mur-Ray was obsessed with following the events in China; then she became inspired.

“When the crackdown came I was devastated, but I didn’t express my reaction in terms of art immediately. I constantly watched news of China on TV, which I don’t ever watch, and I marched to defy China in New York,” she says. “But I needed a period of time to stop and think before I could relate it to my work.”

On a trip to her homeland Hong Kong last July, she realized the tie between Hong Kong and China. “When I was there it hit me, how closely related Hong Kong is to China. I actually went to see the border and thought, wow, that is close.” Mur-Ray also realized the strength of her own connection to China. “When I lived in Hong Kong I never felt I belonged to a country, I had no real sense of country identity,” she says. “So when I became an American citizen it was like a practical need, to gain a nationality. But really, what I am is Chinese.”

When she returned from the Hong Kong trip, she was ready to react to China through her art. She started by painting her door for the “June 4 1989” exhibit. New York’s Asian American Arts Centre, an organization Mur-Ray has been associated with since her career began in the mid-’70s, had approached her to do the piece earlier in the summer.

On one side of her door, Mur-Ray created a steel gray jail door covered with heavy iron bars, and put a map of China behind them. “A very simple idea,” Mur-Ray explains, her English peppered with a Chinese accent.

The other side of the door is more complex. On it, Mur-Ray painted bold vertical lines on a mirror. “So when you look at it, you see your face between these bands, and you don’t know, are you behind bars or what? It puts you in the position to think about what it might be like.”

Thinking about what it might be like for herself to be in this position, restrained by the stringency of the Chinese government, has been liberating for Mur-Ray. “This exhibit and the whole issue of China has brought me, and other Chinese artists, back to terms with who we are. We’ve had to confront it. This has been a relief for me.”

Looking back, and exploring their roots anew can help Chinese artists in the West move forward, Mur-Ray says. “A lot of Chinese artists had the same problem I had in graduate school--they were trying to figure out their place in a Western society, trying to blend in, not knowing if they should blend in,” she says.

“This exhibit showed them that they can draw strength from their identity, they can use it as a theme in their art, or they can create whatever they want. Once the question of identity is settled, we can move beyond it if we want to.”

It has worked that way for her. After focusing on China, Mur-Ray has started to expand her scope again.

The headline of a Time magazine article on Tian An Men square helped Mur-Ray venture into a more universal theme. “Big Lies,” it read in bold, black print. The two words stayed with her. “That stuck in my head, about the big lies, and it just came to me, the idea of expanding the big lie into global big lies. The big lies that are being told in China are being told all over the world.”

So with mixed media materials such as photographs, magnifying glasses, old history books, maps and her oil paints, she has put together a new series of work called simply “Big Lies.” In it, she addresses deceptions in South Africa, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany with dramatic, conceptual works. Pieces from the series will be shown in New York galleries, and in San Diego at Mark Quint Contemporary Art.

“The work I’ve been doing literally reaches across cultural boundaries,” says the slight artist. “There is so much I can do with a global theme.”

To express global ideas, Mur-Ray is fond of using globes. She has done a series of work with globes, and another with maps imprinted with punctuation marks.

“I want people to think about borders and boundaries. What do they really mean anyway?” she says, “And the punctation marks are very universal, they mean the same thing in many different languages.”

Bob Lee, curator of the Asian American Arts Centre, agrees that Mur-Ray’s work with maps causes people to re-think their

orientation. “She redefines what maps mean to us,” Lee says. “We are moving into a multicultural society, people have to leave their shells. Ming’s work wakes them up to this.”

Mur-Ray is becoming more visible on both the East and the West Coasts. She has exhibited works at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, as well as the Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles. Her name is becoming known, which takes the pressure of her. “I don’t have to look for places to exhibit, which is very exciting.” she says. “My name is getting around.”

She lives in La Jolla because she “fell in love with a man who lives here, and I fell in love with the place.” She says that distance from the New York art scene is good for her work.

Although Mur-Ray likes to do conceptual work, she does not want to be labeled as a political artist, or as a Chinese artist. She just wants to be known as a diverse artist. In an upcoming work, she plans to explore environmental issues. “I want to be flexible,” she says, “I don’t always want to make a point. I just want to make people think--it’s not anything beyond that.”