The front doors are propped wide open when I arrive at Guo Jian’s studio. My immediate thought is that the Chinese-Australian artist is taking advantage of a rare blue-sky day in Beijing to let more sunshine spill into his workspace in Songzhuang, an art colony on the Chinese capital’s eastern outskirts.

Then I notice the antiseptic smell of chlorine bleach. Guo, who participated in the Tiananmen Square protests that ended so bloodily on June 4 1989, tells me he has just finished cleaning up the mess from his latest installation and is trying to air out his studio. Just a few days earlier, he had covered a large diorama of Tiananmen Square with 160kg of minced pork.

It had been a hot week in Beijing and it wasn’t long before the meat turned a greyish green hue and started to smell. Guo proudly shows me pictures of his creation. They make me queasy. It’s not the type of thing you want to look at just before lunch. “I wanted to do something privately to mark the anniversary,” Guo says, in Australian-accented English. “But I should have covered [the diorama] in plastic first. It would have been easier to clean up.”