The exhibition is on display at Oddfellow’s Hall, 67 Comur Street, that began on Friday, October 7 and will run until Sunday, October 9.

The exhibition documents the journey of the cultivation practice Falun Dafa (or Falun Gong): as a popular exercise in China to severe persecution by the Chinese Communist Party that resulted in the peaceful responses across the globe.

Falun Dafa practitioner and exhibition curator Daniel Clark said the event aims to raise awareness of the human-rights abuse of practitioners, which includes forced organ harvesting, in China. 

“The more people know about it, the more they can tell others. It’s only through word of mouth that people can learn about this situation. Then things can change,” Mr Clark said.

The 2016 has additional new paintings compared with the 2011 event.

“As the situation has progressed, people have painted new works,”

“The bulk of the paintings were initially put together in 2001 by artists all over the world. In China, the number of Falun Gong practitioners include people from all walks of life and a lot of them were artists. Artists who were detained in China, so a lot of their works are from personal experiences,” Clark said.

Mr Clark said their paintings are their ways of broadcasting the message about persecution and forced organ harvesting to the world.

As part of the exhibition, the award-winning documentary Hard to Believe was screened at 7.00pm–9.00pm on Friday, October 7.

The film covers forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience in China and it shows how difficult it is to raise public awareness.

“It’s very hard to go up against China in our current climate.

“Having been involved in this since 1998, I myself started to learn the exercises before they were ban. To me, it’s kind of like tai chi—what’s the big deal? Suddenly, this group of people were the target of the communist party in China. Their media engine is pretty extensive, so in those first years from about 1999 to 2004, everyone assumed it was a crazy cult. It’s taken 10 years of that cult not being real that people realised ‘oh actually they were just fairly peaceful people doing some exercises’,” Mr Clark said.

“As you saw in the movie, it’s just too hard to believe that people would do that to others,” he said.

The exhibition is opened 10am–4pm daily. Admission is free; however, the paintings may be disturbing for younger children so parental discretion is advised.

More information about the Hard to Believe documentary: http://www.hardtobelievemovie.com/