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= Pun Sing-lui =

Pun Sing-lui (Chinese: 潘星磊; pinyin: Pān Xīnglěi) is a mainland-trained performance artist and Hong Kong resident. He was an active participant of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. After he attended the June Forth vigil held annually in Victoria Park in 1995, he staged his most notable work "Red Action".

A photograph of him going on a hunger strike during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre was featured as the cover of 'Le tremblement de terre de Pékin', a book about the uprising written by French authors Michel Bonnin, Jean-Philippe Béja, and Alain Peyraube.

Early life and education
In 1992, Pan graduated from the Sculpture Department Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and immigrated to Hong Kong.

Notable works
His most well-know performance work is named 'Red Action'. On 16 September 1996, shortly before Hong Kong's handover to China, Pun covered the bronze statue of Queen Victoria in a layer of red paint, and smashed its nose with a hammer. The artist then waited patiently for the press and the police to arrive and claimed his performance was a protest against the “dull, colonial culture” in Hong Kong before undergoing court-mandated psychological evaluation and imprisonment for twenty-eight days. The statue was subsequently restored, at a cost of $150,000.

In an interview with Mariana Wan in the South China Morning Post, Pun offered this rationale for his shocking performance: I smashed this statue. The message is loud and clear: I am saying no to colonial culture. I do not hold anything against Queen Victoria personally. What I am against is the era the statue represents; an era of colonialism. A lot of people do not know why this statue is in the park. Or if they know they are not aware of its significance. . . In Hong Kong, nobody thinks hard on the significance of the statue of Queen Victoria. A lot of artists and people said they had fond feelings towards this statue; that as children, they had played under it. This I find very strange. I don’t know whether that is due to the fact that Hong Kong has neglected its education on historical and cultural matters. . . A museum is a perfect place for it so that people, the future generations, can reflect on the history of Hong Kong. Not a park. For Pun, vandalising the statue represents an act of reclaiming agency, an opportunity to reject colonial culture and to actively challenge everything that Victoria symbolises in the present context, which is "a period of colonial domination."

The local reaction to this gesture was very unfavourable, both within and without the arts community. Artist and art critic Leung Po Shan Anthony argued that this act, however, inadvertently evoked fear among Hong Kong people of the Cultural Revolution and the prospect of future Communist rule. The cultural sector viewed this as an outdated act of resistance by nationalism against colonialism, and it highlighted a "severe divergence" in the emotional fabric between the people of Mainland China and Hong Kong—support for the democratic movement in China by Hong Kong was, it turns out, "wishful thinking". According to Leung Po Shan Anthony, in the eyes of nationalists, Hong Kong was still seen as a dependent that needed to be liberated. Yet, years later, some commentators still believe that Pan Xinglei's action was the opening of the door to democracy for Hong Kong.