'Cutting off my finger was my proudest moment',   The Independent, Friday 14 December 2012

Dissident Chinese artist Sheng Qi is less recognisable than his peer Ai Weiwei, but his work is just as subtly provocative. In 1989, in protest at the Tiananmen Square massacre he chopped off his little finger and buried it in a porcelain flowerpot in Beijing. Some of of his work focuses on replicating this act of anger and defiance, while other works subvert stereotypical images of Chinese power and propaganda. He now lives and works in London.
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The responsibility of the ordinary,   Michele Vicat

Sheng Qi attracted international attention at the landmark exhibition << Between Past and Future - New Photography and Video from China >> held in New York in 2004 at the International Center of Photography and the Asia Society.
The Catalog's cover shows a photograph that would become the central icon of Sheng Qi's interpretation of history.
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Sheng Qi - Picturing History,   Dr. Katie Hill

Paintings and skulls as memento mori
History is always subjective. For the past ten years, Sheng Qi's work has focused on human lives as political subjects affected by historical events, framed by his own life-time of some forty years. His new work, a series of history paintings and a set of hundreds of painted skulls, exudes an aesthetic sombreness which is unprecedented and marks a new stage in his development as an artist.
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An interview with Sheng Qi,   William Corwin

A shipment of bronze astronauts has just arrived at Sheng Qi's hangar-like studio.
There are ten half-scale and four life-size sculptures.
They don't stick out all that much, surrounded by giant paintings of Lhasa, protesters, execution squads, busts of Mao, a drum set (hallmark of artistic coolness), and, at the center of the room, a low table with a miniature Tian'amen Gate surrounded by toy-like tanks, one or two of them overturned.
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Sheng Qi on the past, present and future of China,   David Green - Special to GlobalPost

BEIJING — Leaning against a wall of the F2 Gallery in the east end of Beijing's Dashanzi art district is a painting of an attractive Chinese public security official.
She has an austere pale beauty, accentuated by the image's black and grey coloring, but the real kicker is the bright-red 100-yuan bill she coyly holds in front of her crotch.
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Return To Tiananmen Square, 20 Years Later,   Barry Petersen - CBS Interactive

Artist Sheng Qi (right) said of the Tank Man, "Compared to 4 tanks, the man is tiny, but he is powerful."
Sheng is called the "Four Finger Artist" - after the Tiananmen massacre, he cut off a finger as a kind of protest, then fled to London, where he first saw the Tank Man picture.
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