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One of the main ideas behind this exhibition was that a good lot of our friends working in the media industry had recently to experience increasing censorship. Editors explaining something like "of course I agree with you but you'll understand that we can't publish that" or more simply some drawings mysteriously disappearing from where they were supposed to be. We grant you that self-censorship does exist in Hong Kong, and not only at the Quarry Bay edition of the People's Daily. But what about genuine censorship? Are the editors' fears justified? That's precisely what we wanted to test. Let's do some outrageous stuff and see what happens. Well, as you might have expected, absolutely nothing happened. Until the very last day. On the 31st of May, around 4 pm, I was supposed to meet a guy who told me he wanted to buy my cartoons. The guy never showed up but a delivery man did. It was not a pizza, it was a solicitor's letter, from Benny Kong & Co. acting for Sanrio, the company infamous for one of their most pathetic product: Hello Kitty.
I received the letter on the 31st at 4 pm and I was supposed to reply by 2 pm on the 30st. And I was supposed to "take this warning seriously". I actually did remove the artwork from the exhibition, but as I did for all the other artworks since it was the day we had to dismantle the exhibition anyway. And that's it. A couple of days later, two articles were published regarding this story. The first one in the South China Morning Post:
And the second one in Asiaweek:
Obviously Sanrio was not going to have a lot of support. A good lot of people proposed to help me for free if ever they wanted to sue me and it's was not very good publicity for Sanrio to attack a harmless artist. That's probably why they didn't carry on. I don't know. But what I learned from this story is that in Hong Kong you can speak absolutely freely about politics providing you have the guts, but never ever think of poking fun at a cat. Or at big companies. Once again, we can see that a free market economy is obviously the best way to ensure freedom of speech… For an example of a similar case that turned rather sour, you should head to the U.S.: "They say you never forget your first. While I don't remember when my Frap hymen was lost to one of Starbucks' delicious mocha Frappuccinos, I certainly won't forget the last one I'll ever have. It was April 29, 2000: the day Starbucks sued me." If you're interested by Kieron Dwyer's story, go to the Web site of Too Much Coffee Man. It all started with that:
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