White Paper

White paper, started 2008

The four sheets of White Paper (Hotan) were crafted for me by an Uyghur elder in Xinjiang, China, in 2008. The sheets were folded in four to fit into an A4 envelope and make it without trouble through the Olympics-game-era mail paranoia. Watching the destruction of everything Uyghur escalate over the next 14 years, I treasured the papers. For me, they slowly became relics of a captive land, a buried culture, a forbidden language, and vanished friends. In November 2022, a fire in Xinjiang's capital Urumqi triggered unprecedented demonstrations across China. Protestors held up blank pieces of paper, in a symbolic protest against the party's then-ongoing zero-COVID policy and its opportunistic excuse for further crackdown and censorship, in Xinjiang above all. Even the blank sheets were cause for arrest and the movement thus became known as the White Paper Protest. At a loss for better words, I turned to bleach, the quintessential COVID-19 material, to inscribe the name of the city where my papers were made — Hotan — into their very fiber. The words are, therefore, not painted but rather removed, as the bleach killed the paper. Unlike the name Xinjiang, which is a Mandarin word for what Uyghurs refer to as Uyghurstan, Hotan is the direct translation of a real Uyghur name. Its real spelling in Uyghur, خوتەن , is a language that the people of Xinjiang are not allowed to speak even inside their own homes.