Badiucao

Opening Event: Wednesday 6 August, 6–8pm
Exhibition Dates: 7 August – 28 August

Opening Hours: Mondays 10am–3pm; Thursdays, Saturdays & Sundays 11am–4pm

Disagree Where We Must marks the long-overdue first major solo exhibition of Badiucao in Australia, the country he has called home since 2009. While his work has been celebrated in prestigious national museums across Europe and beyond, he has faced extraordinary resistance in mounting exhibitions on Australian soil. This delay is not due to lack of merit, but the chilling effects of Beijing’s far-reaching campaign of censorship, intimidation, and transnational repression, a campaign that has cast its shadow even over Australian cultural institutions.

Badiucao is one of the world’s most fearless and prolific Chinese dissident artists. His work confronts authoritarianism with unwavering clarity and unflinching conviction. Through bold, satirical, and visually arresting imagery, he dismantles the architecture of dictatorship and lays bare the mechanics of propaganda, censorship, and historical erasure. In Badiucao’s view, when democracy dies and free speech is silenced, truth itself is rewritten, and often forgotten. His art stands as a visual counter-narrative to the state-sanctioned myths of power.

Using his brush and pen as weapons of resistance, Badiucao documents the crimes the Chinese Communist Party would prefer the world forget. His paintings, prints, and video works in this exhibition expose the full breadth of Beijing’s human rights abuses: the genocide of Uyghurs in Xinjiang; the violent suppression of Hong Kong’s democracy movement; the systematic eradication of Tibetan cultural identity; and the expansion of transnational repression tactics used to silence dissent far beyond China’s borders — including here in Australia.

The timing of this exhibition is crucial. As Prime Minister Anthony Albanese completes his second visit to Beijing, his government's official China policy echoes the mantra: “We will cooperate where we can, disagree where we must, and engage in our national interest.” But this rhetoric — however diplomatic — collapses under the weight of the Chinese regime’s global ambitions. The CCP does not permit disagreement; it weaponises economic cooperation to erase it. To engage without resistance is to capitulate. To trade without conscience is to sell out democracy.

Disagree Where We Must  is not simply a critique, it is a call to vigilance. It urges Australia to wake up to the cost of silence. To recognise that short-term economic benefit must not come at the expense of national sovereignty, democratic values, or the safety of those who dare to speak truth to power.

This exhibition also highlights China's growing alignment with other authoritarian regimes, such as Russia and Iran, a sinister axis of power threatening global stability. Badiucao’s work draws direct lines between Beijing’s backing of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, its escalating threats toward Taiwan, and its infiltration of Australian politics, academia, and media.

This exhibition is a mirror held up to Australia, demanding we ask ourselves: Where do we stand? And where must we draw the line?

It is not only Badiucao’s art that challenges the system. It is the very act of exhibiting it.

This is Goldstone Gallery’s fourth first solo exhibition by a major artist since its opening in February 2025, and it has become the gallery’s trademark to do exactly that: to champion silenced and marginalised voices, and to bring powerful, confronting, and necessary art into the public eye in Australia.