Art in Protest

This NFT collection was created by Badiucao as part of the Art in Protest Residency, a collaboration between Gray Area Foundation for the Arts and the Human Rights Foundation. The residency is an opportunity for artists whose art is dedicated to promoting democracy and human rights globally, to explore and expand their digital practices. Throughout the residency, artists-in-residence develop projects that use art and technology to create social and civic impact. In addition to Badiucao, the inaugural cohort of artists includes Belarusian illustrator and graphic designer Lilia Kvatsabaya, and Cuban performance artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara. 

10% of proceeds will be donated to support the Art in Protest program.

Snowboard

Snowboard examines China's modern Orwellian digital dictatorship and surveillance state. Domestically, the Chinese Government continues to roll out the country-wide social credit system to monitor society and quash civic organization. Citizen activity is monitored closely for “dissident behavior”, and punished with travel bans, slower internet, and being barred from higher education. This surveillance has expanded to overseas Chinese and foreign populations with tracking via apps like WeChat, TikTok, and Zoom.

Hockey

Hockey uses the sport as a metaphor for the violent Chinese occupation of Tibet, with documented acts of murder, rape and arbitrary imprisonment; torture and cruel, inhuman and degraded treatment of Tibetans on a large scale. More than 150 Tibetan people have performed self-immolation as an extreme form of protest against the systemic oppression and erasure of Tibetan communities and culture.

Biathlon

Biathlon depicts China’s genocide against the Uyghur people. Up to 2 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities have been reported to have been placed in a sprawling network of internment camps across the Xinjiang region, according to the US State Department. Former Uyghur detainees have documented their experiences of indoctrination, sexual abuse, and forced sterilization.

Unstopped, the Beijing 2022 Olympics will be looked back as a human rights atrocity on par with the 1936 Olympics, held in Nazi Germany.

Figure Skating

In Figure Skating, the artist depicts the figure skating blades slicing through the ice to reveal the bleeding petals of Hong Kong’s iconic flower: Bauhinia blakeana.

In 2019, the Chinese government unleashed a brutal response against Hong Kong's freedom and democracy movement, making dozens of violent arrests of journalists and activists, some as young as 16. Today the autonomy, freedom of speech, and independence of the judiciary systems have been abolished by the National Security Law. Activists, journalists, and artists are arrested and extradited in unprecedented numbers.

Curling

In Curling the artist has replaced the sliding stone with the Covid-19 virus. Thousands of internal reports have shown how the Chinese Government censored the extent of infection in the early days of the outbreak in Wuhan. In its attempt to control its people and a global narrative, the Chinese Government prioritized rigid control over the well-being and lives of over five million people who have died globally in this pandemic.