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China's
Long March Is Retraced With Artistic
Steps
Enallane @
2004-11-10 10:34
China's Long March Is Retraced
With Artistic Steps
By CRAIG SIMONS
Published:
August 18, 2004
BEIJING, Aug. 17 - Wang Wenhai, the
53-year-old self-proclaimed Yanan Clay Sculpture King, has
three goals. First, he wants to build a 426-foot-tall statue
of Mao Zedong in Yanan, the Chinese Communist Party's historic
revolutionary base in the northwest. Then he wants to make a
giant memorial commemorating Mao's philosophies, with possibly
a nod to Karl Marx. Finally, if he has time, he wants to carve
25,000 tiny statues of Mao to leave along the route of the
Long March, the 6,000-mile trek that members of the fledgling
Communist Party made in the mid-1930's.
"If everyone
were like Mao," said Mr. Wang, who has been making Mao
sculptures for three decades, "the world would be beautiful."
Of course not everyone thinks so highly Mao, who led
the Communists to victory in 1949. Even Deng Xiaoping, Mao's
most prominent successor, signed off on a judgment that Mao
had made "gross mistakes."
But for Lu Jie, the curator
of a huge contemporary art project - "The Long March: A
Walking Visual Display," shown in Beijing and remote parts of
western China - letting people make up their own minds is
exactly the point.
"We need to open a space to think
about art, culture and history," he said. "Criticism is very
important." He said that he spent a lot of his money to put on
the show and also received donations from Chinese and
foreigners. The artists, including Mr. Wang, are contributing
their works and time.
Mr. Lu said he chose the Long
March as a theme because no moment in modern Chinese history
was loaded with more patriotic symbolism. Historically the
facts are simple. In 1934 Mao and his followers fled their
rural bases in southern China as the Nationalist army closed
around them. During the next year they scaled mountains,
forded rivers and crossed empty plains to reach Yanan in
Shaanxi Province. The journey was so arduous that perhaps only
a tenth of Mao's original force of 100,000 reached the new
sanctuary.
Less simple, though, are the layers of
propaganda that the government has heaped on the journey.
Hundreds of nationalistic films and documentaries have been
made about the flight, and every year students across the
country retrace parts of the route. "It has become very heroic
and romantic," Mr. Lu said. "But people need to find their own
interpretations."
Despite a slow cultural opening,
Chinese academics are still forbidden to teach about many
historical events and such public testaments are rare.
By bringing contemporary artwork by about 250 artists,
some Chinese and some foreign, including the American artist
Judy Chicago, to 20 sites - mostly backwater towns along the
Long March route - Mr. Lu hopes to help that happen. The tour
began last summer in Ruijin, Jiangxi Province, where Mr. Lu
and several artists engaged villagers in a debate about
China's increasingly capitalist politics and economy.
The project's exhibition had visited a dozen sites
before pausing in September for a series of shows, including
one with Mr. Wang's statues of Mao in a tiny Beijing gallery,
the 25,000 Cultural Transmission Center. In Zunyi, a town in
Guizhou Province where Mao wrestled control of the party from
other aspirants, the Beijing performance artist Wang Chuyu had
volunteers read from the Chinese constitution in front of a
monument to revolutionary heroes.
Other pieces examine
the relationship between memory and myth. Qin Ga, a
performance artist from Inner Mongolia, is tracking the
project's progress getting a map of its stops tattooed on his
back, physically creating a "site of collective and individual
memory," said the project's Web site,
www.longmarchfoundation.org.
The work of Wang Wenhai,
who was born to poor farmers in central China, also deals in
memory. Despite witnessing scores of neighbors starve during
the widespread famine that followed the government's forced
collectivization of farms in the late 1950's, he became an
ardent Mao follower during the Cultural Revolution. "In 1966 I
became a Red Guard,'' he said. "I studied Mao. I carried out
the revolution."
Mr. Wang had a perfectly proletariat
background, and in 1970 he was sent to Yanan to work as a tour
guide at a museum celebrating the party. There he met an
artist who taught him sculpture, and he quickly applied the
craft to glorifying Mao. On the back of many of his works he
still inscribes the Cultural Revolution-era phrase "Mao is the
red sun in our hearts!" But unlike most Chinese, many of whom
suffered under Mao, Mr. Wang did not discard his fanaticism
after Mao died in 1976. "Wang loves Mao," Mr. Lu, the curator,
said. "He's totally devoted to his art."
No one who
looks at any of the more than 1,300 statues by Mr. Wang
questions his devotion, but since he began to collaborate with
the Long March project his works have become increasingly
abstract. Mao is traditionally portrayed in dignified style -
serene, thoughtful, usually with one arm raised in a gesture
of imperial benevolence. But several of Mr. Wang's recent
works have stripped away Mao's facial features or show him
lying in bourgeois luxury. "This is so people can imagine
their own Mao," he said. "They should think about what kind of
person Mao was."
Mr. Lu said he hoped to take works
and documentation of his project abroad. Several pieces will
be exhibited at a biennale in Taipei, Taiwan, in October. For
the large shows, he said, he will take several of Mr. Wang's
statues.
Mr. Wang is happy about that. Partly he wants
to share his devotion to Mao, but he also hopes to find a
market for his works, which range in price from a few hundred
to tens of thousands of dollars. He said he needed the money
to build the world's biggest Mao statue, to tower over Yanan
at 426 feet.
"We should all understand Mao better," he
said.
http://nisuwang.net/report/nyt.htm
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I
have to leave you now. 
