Oslo Freedom Forum: How NFTs Helped Chinese Dissident Artist Badiucao Evade Censorship - Ep. 369

Transcript

hey all this recording is from a panel i moderated at the oslo freedom forum back in may the panel was about the work of bariocho a chinese distant artist who has used nfts in his artwork you absolutely must listen to this discussion barrio chow is one of the most interesting and creative people i've ever interviewed and the story of how he became the artist he is today is riveting i think you'll also love the twists and turns in his journey to using nfts and learn a lot from the challenges he and nikki selkin the director of creative development at gray area with whom he worked on his nft projects faced one other note due to the upcoming holiday and the fact that after four months i think my book tour and catching kovid and everything else

that i've been doing in the whirlwind ever since i released my book has all finally caught up to me so there will be no weekly news recap today other than that happy 4th of july everyone and now on to the show hey builders looking for one of the best scaling solutions in crypto that's easy avalanche's breakthrough subnet design lets you minimize transaction costs and maximize your speed consistency and user experience to experience web3 like never before head to avox.network to learn more with the crypto.com app you can buy earn and spend crypto in one place download and get 25 dollars with the code laura

link in the description [Music] [Music] hi everyone thanks so much for coming so i had actually never heard of buddyatsau before being asked to do this panel but i have to say i was really taken by um the kind of life story that brought him to his distant art especially for me as an american i remember as a teenager watching what happened on the screen on you know the

tv in my living room or maybe it was my bedroom at that time um you know what was happening at tiananmen square in 1989 and his experience of that even though he was living in china was completely different so can you just explain that story and how that kind of set you off on this path to becoming an artist um well that's exactly why you know i want to entering different communities including the community of crypto brothers and sisters i feel like now we are really living in our own greets like i can have a great followers and a reputation from the dissident community the new circles the china related circles

but maybe i'll be a complete strangers to the people who are into the cryptocurrency or nfd unless i bring my art to the community to introduce myself well the very reason for me to pay attention to nft or the blockchain is because the very censorship that is happening in china i grew up in china when the tiananmen massacre happened in 1989 i was only three years old so for me i wouldn't have a real memory if no one from my life like teachers doctors parents schools tv publication mentioned that and that is the reality in china so up until university time

i never have any idea that what happened in 1989 during the movement and the massacre in the end i only know the event because i accidentally downloaded the pirates the film from internet and then someone inserted a documentary about a tenure massacre into that pirated file or film and that's how i know it and when i know it i was only i was i i was already like 22. so in 22 years nobody mentioned it and when i'm watching those students marching on the street protesting eventually gunned down crashed by tanks by the chinese government

i'm really shocked because i'm also in the university time and like those young kids being killed by the government however in this gap nobody filled this black hole for me nobody tells me what happened and if not for some genius doing their own things in the pirating film industry i would never know it um you know it's really shocking to make me angry that how the chinese government can easily erase memory like that and just steal away from the people so that in the future we cannot reflect on that so in the future will remain in the darkness yeah and actually one comment i want to

make on that is people know that hrf is really known for using technology in its work and you may know that they have worked with sending flash drives into north korea in this very same subversive way so i actually find it so fascinating that the way that you discovered this historic event that is known around the world but happened in your home country was through something that was a very very similar strategy to what hrf uses so the other part of your story that was so interesting to me was that later you went to australia and i think most people in your personal life thought that you were like a preschool teacher so talk about that period of your life

um so i actually started in law school in china believe it or not there are still law schools in china um and when i grow up because my family history my great parents were actually like the first group of filmmakers in china and they all got persecuted during a campaign against intellectuals in 1957 so for me you know this is the family listen one is don't be an artist dangerous two is don't stay in china it can be dangerous at any time so i end up going to australia but it's not easy to be immigrant you have to choose the major that allow you to stay and in australia nobody want to be a teacher especially a

preschool teacher because it's very hard work get paid very bad but that gives me a chance to stay so that's why i choose to be a preschool teacher i started master's degree for education and kind of doing this detour for four years until i have the green card and started making art and so talk about that period because you were not known as an artist at that time you uh there's an amazing documentary about bariatric and in the beginning he is wearing a mask and it's not the kind of mask we've been wearing in covid um and you really were were hidden and i think you know during this uh conference you've been talking a lot about privacy

and you really like lived that lifestyle for a while tell tell the audience a little bit about that why you were doing that um you know not like banksy you know he is being anonymous for its uh like commercial track for artists who want to seeking the truth from china you have to hire yourself because once your identity is revealed then your family will be harassed then personally you will be putting into the danger and i learned this in 2018 so from the first cartoon that i did in 2011 to 2018 i remain anonymous i would not you know have an event like this if i have to do a public like a

performance i will have to wear in a must actually i have a whole collection of mosques that i wear for these seven years and it was turned into installation now exhibiting in prague oh wow yeah they're like full-on mask that covers entire face you can sort of see his glasses through them um but talk a little bit about the art that you started making like what were the messages you were sending and was your hope that people in china would see them or like what was your intention with that art i think as an artist it's something very important that we want to express things i do not just believe art should only for the sake of art art is a form of language it's because you want to communicate with the people outside of

china and inside of china but i guess the difficulty that being an artist in china is you have to dealing with the censorship and this censorship is very hard going around especially when your language is written language because in china they have this huge internet censorship it's called great firewall and it's much based on words so that they have a database that goes through every vocabulary like channel mastercard nobel peace prize uh or by this how by rs name they are all sensitive words so if these words appear in any sentence we're taking down um swiftly however i think aren't providing this

very unique chance because every time we create a new image we do not use the old language or vocabulary that we use in literature so in that way you know the chinese authority have to find this artwork recognize it under understand it log it and delete it so regardless how you know efficient they will be they'll always be a window for me as an artist to talking about those issues and among these years another i think silver bullet i find is if you manage to kind of bonding a very political censored image with something very popular and lovely like winning the fools i don't know how many of you knows but

online doesn't mean that compare xi jinping with them we need the pools and then the chinese already just freaked out it's like oh we have to be serious this this is the supreme leader right we have to take it down but when they take it down people ask questions because it's so common because it's so loved because it's so welcome and then every time you manage to do that you create a catch-22 for the authority because if they do not take it down then the joke goes on the power being diminished but if they take down people ask questions and whenever people are starting to ask questions you create cracks in this authority yeah and just a few other examples of

some of the artworks there was one um kind of showing how uh it was when xi jinping i guess became what was a dictator for life or what it's probably not that phrase but that's you know what we would say and he did three uh portraits and one you know looks just like xi jinping does now and then one is of him you know older and then the last one is like a skull and then i what did the phrase say um she forever but actually i cheated because i used to face app oh okay to make it look older and then the uh another one was like talking about china's influence in australia and he showed the koala you know which is this symbol

of australia uh with a painter painting it into a panda which again you know is this kind of commentary on on the influence of china in australia so in general it sounds like in your career you know there's this blend of elements it's like criticism of china but also like trying to get around the censorship regime in there to get your message out oh by the way actually before we go on let's just explain to people how you made the shift from wearing the mask to now revealing your identity what happened at that time and then we'll i'll go to my next question um i think it's so hard to keep anonymous i managed to do it for seven years but in 2018 i supposed to have a very large

exhibition in hong kong and we were inviting like joshua wong and rides to the opening however just three days before the show my family in shanghai got taken by the police to the police station the national security police so it means my identity got compromised at some stage and the message was sending to me by my family saying that i have to cancel the show otherwise i will be in trouble my family will be in trouble so well they also say they are going to send in the police to to hong kong in 2018. now hong kong is a very different city because the whole national security law but in 2018 hong kong still has its freedom and autonomous it is kind of

unsinkable the chinese authority is saying they're going to sending police to hong kong so that makes everyone freaks out and the show was actually cancelled in 2018. but then um the question was wrote to me you know obviously i can choose to stopping making art that i believe in in exchange maybe i can have some extent of safety you know authority a dictatorship like that they never forgive they never forget and also if i giving up the art that i've been working on years and years it's a betrayal to my own identity and i do value myself and an artist but

the bottom line for artists i think is the freedom of speech is that i do not compromise because of some pressure i do not draw red lines in the creation so i decided to reveal my face after half a year and here i'm now you know how i look like so as i was saying earlier you know you see these themes of kind of trying to stick it to the regime in china getting around the censorship um and also um you know thinking about technology like you know i just love what you said about how the regime the censorship regime has really built around the words and so using images is such a powerful and like sneaky way to uh to get your word out so

um at some point obviously you ended up turning to nfts and now you've done two collections as nfts how did you stumble upon nfts what problem did you think that solved for you and you know why did you decide to issue some art as nfts well firstly you know when i firstly hear about nft i think it's a great idea i do not see it as a genre or style of art for me nft is a form of ownership that kind of authorized a possibility of original digital art and for that it really opens the door to all art and artists and however i think now it really goes into

a kind of weird and that when you think about nft it's not a diversified world what do you think about it is those bought a pad and boring collection just repeating itself for me it's problematic but the original the possibility of nfd that authorized the digital original version of limited edition is actually opening door to all artists and all kind of art and also i think with my collaboration with human rights foundation and particularly with gray area that give me a chance not just practice as an artist but also knowing or exploiting this technology to extending my platform from just

traditional social media street art gallery practice to a new community and nikki can you tell us a little bit more about great area's role in helping him with the nfts and yeah um i'm at barachow or gosh over a year like a year ago and um saw your work that was in the last year's freedom forum in miami it was a series of posters and what you see above above me and i had seen a year of doc and other work of yours but i decided that that would probably be the best set for us to launch as an nft collection and you and i had a lot of discussions about how that could be made interesting or activist right because many people are using nfts for you know monetary gain

they're not they're not thinking about them in a way that they're protest pieces but what we decided to do was do a custom contract which means that we wrote our own blockchain contract where in which the participants who purchased an nft also the price was pretty inexpensive for them they were allowed to write a message that was irrefutably written into the blockchain a message of protest against the cpp and so every single person who bought one of those nfts they minted them themselves and that went into their crypto a wallet and also an open sea and those messages will live so as in china this is my favorite part about like what we did is first of all it was the first

large mass protest action written into the blockchain which is the tech stack that runs uh crypto and nfts but the cool thing is that um if china doesn't like something you do for example there is somebody who made a fake badachao website that we have we try to take down and other things they do all kinds of stuff to discredit bandicho all the time but they cannot turn off his artwork they cannot turn off uh things that are listed into the blockchain because the blockchain as you guys if you went to any of the talks before this all those bitcoin talks they were discussing how it's a bunch of servers all over the world it's a decentralized server network so you can shut off all

the servers in china like they did they shut down all the bitcoin servers but you can't shut off all the servers all over the world because they're everywhere it's like playing whack-a-mole and so what we did was make something that was pretty impossible just to stop and and a message that can't be taken down so i think that that was the power of what vatican did in having hundreds of people make these nfts and make protest messages against china and just out of curiosity do you remember any of the messages that people wrote yeah there was there was a lot i mean some of them were just saying solidarity to bad child china there was some that were like longer and kind of poetic um they're

and and the weird but the the issue is that they're actually written into the code so you have to kind of go into ether scan and click decode and then it will reveal the messages um they but the value of them is that they are written into the code so they aren't they and also like you're saying they can't just scan them as language because of the way they're encoded so it's it's a really cool text stack and i love the idea of badasha using blockchain they're um i know one of your mentors and folks you've worked in with uh worked with before who i think did he win the hovel prize way he was here for something yeah yeah so he did a blockchain artwork protest

piece riot also uh did an nft series but nobody has done something like what botocho just did no one has done a protest message nft collection so it was a really exciting experience join over 10 million people using crypto.com the easiest place to buy earn and spend over 150 cryptocurrencies spend your crypto anywhere using the crypto.com visa card get up to eight percent cashback instantly plus 100 rebates for your netflix spotify and amazon prime subscriptions download the crypto.com app now and get 25 with the code laura link in the description

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adoption experience web3 like never before scale with subnets head to avox.network to learn more and can you just talk a little bit about the artwork that you chose like you know what these images represent um sure probably in the very beginning of this year the most discussed china related topic is this uh winter olympics is going to host in beijing a lot of us actually call it genocide olympics because it really a disgrace is shame for the international community to allowing a country that have a genocide against wicked community

ongoing and still have this chance to celebrate humanity so i decided to launch this kind of fake advertisement for the games using each of the sports but discussing about different human rights issues in china like the wake of genocide the hong kong cracking down the south of tibetans um the very censorship in the early stage of kovi 19 and so i think this this is the thing that the people should know and also people should know it because the it seems like it's inevitable the the olympic well beyond but at least we should use this as a opportunity to discussing those works

and this is not just nft it was firstly released in miami last year in the freedom forum that it has merged as street art has merged as posters all over the world a lot of major cities and then the last step was also moving those works into the nft world and also the difficulty is it's very hard to exhibiting those works in the conventional venue um i just had a show in prague last week it's opening and the chinese government is calling the museum as well as the foreign minister office of czech republic in order to kill the show so this is the pressure that i'm facing in the conventional art venue but

obviously in the digital world on the blockchain the gatekeeper is much less i think the chinese influence is much lesser so in a way that helped me to dodging all those censorship and easily creating a new community that introduced those very important message to new groups and peoples and do you have a sense of how much your art actually gets through to china and whether or not when you use the nfts if that had any kind of material impact on how easily people were able to see the images well i think it has two stages firstly is we need to make sure it's still online it's due accessible and for traditional

platform yes i can put it on twitter on this screen on facebook or even on google but we all know all those companies more or less have a history of compromise uh google has its dragonfly projects facebook uh come on mr mark zuckerberg is running in the tiananmen square and pretending he really enjoys the bloody kind of air on that massacre side so it's it's it's not stable it's i do not think the traditional even online space would be that safe but for me i think the cryptocurrency world the blockchain are providing some mechanism much stronger and safer than those conventional venues

so there's one criticism of using nfts in this way which for those of you who understand the technology actually what it is is uh kind of this indelible pointer but it's to a file that is stored elsewhere on the internet and so you know just like any other file in the internet it could technically be taken down how did you address that issue um well one thing we did was it goes to something called ipfs um and that is a file storage system so the record of your nft is pointing back to that and actually because body childlike is really interested in open access you actually gave the files on twitter for anyone to print so people all have print quality files already all

over the internet they've been distributed and people printed them so one of the things i actually did for record or holders and non-holders anyone who joined our discord was create links to files and send multiple links through i think google drive and other ways for them to download like multiple times and so you know a lot of the protest activity that is going on and just in general like the crypto community and nfc community is going on through things like signal discord telegram twitter um so we we're doing you know ad hoc and community organizing on the tech stack tools and frankly we're constantly jumping from tool to tool depending on what's safest so um we we have a discord

we shared it through that but also the other thing to keep in mind is that even if we lose the pointer to the actual file in china the blockchain record with the protest statements are not images and they are in the blockchain and they can't be deleted and even if china wants to say oh i'm going to take down ether scan you guys remember like if you were anyone of any certain age like how we used to have like we still have but pirate bay and torrents and all that stuff and there'd always just be a new pirate bay pirate bay dot whatever it's we could do the same thing and the same thing does happen with ether scan so they'll just make a new website that points to the

same files again and again and again and again so um in a way the the value like i said again of blockchain is that it's almost impossible to take down the actual servers holding the things and then you can just keep making new domain pointers repeatedly from different locations to the same information just like we've seen with like torrents you know so i guess it matters but it doesn't matter because it's so easy to distribute information using the technical tools we have today yeah because ether scan is basically just a website for looking at the ethereum blockchain which is indelible and um it's sort of like you could sort of think of it as

you could use like firefox or chrome to look at um you know some domain that you own or even like the new york times website or whatever um so yeah if either scan went down no worries somebody else will create some other block explorer so you actually did a second campaign using nfts can you talk about that and why you chose to do this and it's slightly different the second drop was not that carefully planned because it's right start from uh the ukraine war um you know by the russian invaders so once the news outbreaks it's it's i guess it's really haunting everyone around the world especially the people in europe and i starting to making art

alongside with the development of the invasion and among the image there are a lot of like online means merged uh like this very famous sunflower seeds i mean the old lady like giving a handful of sunflowers to a russian soldier said like well at least when you fall down here there will be sunflower popping out so a lot of those very interesting and powerful elements has merged they've become my inspiration and i created a body of new work that is dedicated to the fighters from ukraine as well as denouncing the the support from the chinese government to put into war and now this work has been uh released

as nft on the uh super rare as one-on-one works and i'm going to donate all the profit from the selling to the people in korean i mean because of the uh nfc technology because the existing platform allow you to act this very fast um imagine if you have to do an exhibition and then sell in an auction it takes a long time two weeks one week yeah we did it in one week and we've already sold uh thousands of dollars uh in ethereum and we just sent one to what was the group we just sent it to that we were talking on signal right actually ukraine government have they

posted um their wallet to accepting cryptocurrency right on twitter it's like send us your money right here but when we just worked with another aid group we just we just sent another uh piece for auction from the collection and we did it in like a week and a half like that's an unheard of in the art world you know and to make that kind of revenue directly going to aid someone it's just and it was just being about just like texting back and forth so it's pretty inspiring you know i love it i love it it's super interesting and do you plan to work with nfts more in the future um definitely i think well now i guess most of people are kind of worried the market is crashing but i think the ones crashing out of

those boring monkey hats it's kind of a good thing i mean yeah well this evolves and then in the end of the day you should see what's really valuable and meaningful i mean buying nft is almost like buying two things one is you're buying a piece of art an image so firstly you should understand the value of the art um for me i think political art and art about our time particularly important because of course there are art for the sake of art that are exploring the sensory beauty but there are also a history of world art that is talking about the most important issue in the time it is like a footnote that of our

history and because of a certain regime like china they're deleting almost every existing footnote and then r become one of the voices can be lifted so that is why political art particularly has its value and secondly for nft and because all the things that we've discussed on online censorship and everything that makes political art very rare and it makes it very hard to be purchased in conventional venues like galleries because the chinese government could just call and come to the show and then it makes the nft probably is the most valuable platform and way for police

cars to uploading and make this into a collectible artwork so i i'm not here just to calling help to the political artists who are trying to ft i'm also want to showing to the people and collectors that you need to learn about art you need to learn about why political art will be important and valuable in the longer term yes you should earn some money by flipping with the monkey heads but you should also think about diversify your investment think about some blue ribbon stocks which will be the

political art i mean let's imagine after 20 years you have to explain to your grandchildren that what you collect as nft do you have to say that oh you know justin bieber have that monkey hat so that's very valuable and important then you have to go through the whole trouble to explain who justin bieber is but imagine if you collected something that recording the changing time of our world they're recording the brutality of one of the most powerful countries like china and foreseeing the change which is coming then it'll be much valuable and easy to explain to your grandchildren so for the

sake of the future try to diversify your investment not just monkey hats right so we started uh quite late does anybody have any questions uh what if you're not a formal artist but enjoy doing art on the side and then decided to post at nft what's the rationale behind that if there's a project you're working on but don't have a platform but just doing it for fun or just want to get started i think platform is always the problem for not just political arts for any emerging artists and and what nft providing is a platform a showcase as well but also a possible way to help you financially so why not

try that it's i think the most important thing is as artists you should be faithful and truthful to your art do not just create art that can be sold on nfd platform do your own art put it on the nft that's how you be truthful as an artist but that's also how you can help the nfd market to not just making the same standard work and make it an interesting um and diversified word as any artwork outside of the digital space then you're a businessman you're not an artist artists have to do new works

yeah that's that's my understanding the other thing i would say is you know if you do well let's say you mince an nft and you do well one of the most important things about the nft community of artists that i've been part of for a little while is that you support other artists so using your voice your platform and your energy to you know tweet retweet repost um share the work of others and buy their work the hit which was um i know this is like a very blockchain heavy conference but um tezos and nunc which is now defunct but that community of artists on that chain which by the way it's like two dollars to buy a tesla so it's much more affordable and a great entry point for new artists they are all about we're all about retweeting buying and there's a movement

called object for object or um teslas for tesla's to like retweet by and share the work of others and particularly diverse groups women people of color queer people you know making sure that you're creating a space for the voices of not just the hegemony or whatever the mainstream like bodhisattvas saying the monkey heads but actually you know diverse people and amplifying their voice using your power to do that so if you do suddenly get power like use that power you know share retweet body shot everybody like it's all about collective action and nfts are no different yeah but just share the work you like don't share the work for their support

um so i'm really curious as we're making this movement from um from nfts as revenue for artists who are operating commercially into the realm of political artists who are raising money for causes socially engaged artists who are raising money for communities they're working in what you've seen out there in the world and what you're thinking through this experience about revenue split models that can benefit artists who also need support while supporting communities that they are caring for want to stand up for um and what you've seen out there so for me because you know i am not an ft artist i can only talk through my little experience

as political artists you know the censorship is not just coming from uh you do not have chance to exhibiting but also the collector will have hesitated by work because once the financial record reveals who they are they will be arranged by the chinese government but nft and blockchain was providing this possibility for buying things anonymously at least it's very hard to tell or trace so that definitely opening supporters and in that way actually supporting uh young artists like me and for me personally what i really want to achieve in the future is somehow establish this platform to encouraging emerging artists

like myself when five ten years ago because when i started making political art it's really no money and no support no platform and i only insist in the continuous work because somehow sometimes someone helped me give me a hand so i do think it's it's very necessary to actually establish this platform dedicate to political art dedicate to the art that's serving the community and um kind of branding them together as a way to support each other all right well i think that's everything thank you all so much for coming thank you

have a great rest [Music] you