Anna Zhang learned a blood-red secret — and let gallery-goers in on it.
The secret was how her grandfather died, and how everyday people could have participated in the mass evil of Mao Zedong’s blood-red “Cultural Revolution.“
Zhang, a graduating Yale senior, revealed the secret in a series of washed-red posters on a gallery wall this month — in the same Chapel Street gallery, at Yale’s art school, that attracted international media attention because of what it didn’t contain. The group exhibit ended up not including a controversial senior project by a different student, Aliza Shvartz, about a series of purported self-induced miscarriages.
No media mention was made of another wall in that same space, where hung another bloody tale, Zhang’s truly ground-breaking 06/06/1968.
Zhang’s exhibit is alternately moving and chilling to view. The show’s over now; perhaps a gallery in town can give it a second showing for New Haven at large. (Perhaps in time for the International Festival of Arts & Ideas?)
Zhang (pictured) didn’t learn the secret about her grandfather, a government engineer, until she was an adult and visiting China, the land of her birth. She’d always wondered how her grandfather had died; although she’d never met him, something about him made her special in his life. Her mother, who had been only 9 when he died, would never reveal the secret.
Instead, an uncle did, as they drove by smokestacks on the way to a train station.
She recalls the story as part of the book that accompanies her exhibit. The book tells the story not only of her grandfather, but of her own search for how her native countrymen could have participated in the destruction of professors (turned in by their students), parents (turned in by their own children), and countless everyday scapegoats as part of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the campaign 40 years ago to sniff out and destroy all “class enemies” and “bourgeois elements.” The book also tells how Zhang came to explore the subject as a visual art piece. She created posters contrasting red-screened photos with propaganda slogans from the era on two sets of panels: One straightforward, one sliced into warring segments.
(Click here to read Zhang’s full artist’s statement.)
(Click here to read the book describing the different posters in the exhibit.)
“As we pulled onto the expressway,” Zhang writes of her ride that day with her uncle, “I noticed three tall smokestacks approaching. They were just normal smokestacks, nothing notable about their charred, polluting forms. Then Uncle He pointed at them and said, ‘That is where your grandfather died.’
“I felt every part of my body recoil as I looked at him and looked at the smokestacks. ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
“‘Oh you don’t know?’ He sounded surprised. ‘Your grandfather, during the Cultural
Revolution…they were really torturing him in every way possible and finally one day he asked to go fetch some water…and climbed the tallest one and…jumped.’
“‘I see.’ I didn’t say anything else for the rest of the trip.
“Somehow, after seeing those smokestacks, he stopped being perfect and he stopped being strong. …
“But what angered me the most was that it had to come down to this. At some point, there were people who made him feel that he had no choice but to die. They made his life so bad that he decided to give up everything good he had in this world so he didn’t have to face them anymore.”
From there, Zhang embarked on a quest. Besides gathering the photos and mining the slogans, she interviewed witnesses to the massacres. She didn’t receive simple answers.
Hence the two sets of posters.
The easy-to-follow straightforward posters, while powerful in their own right, follow a conventional tack. The government slogans are reproduced verbatim, followed by photos that bely the words. (The notes in the accompanying booklet give the full stories behind the photos.)
“Long Live Chairman Mao!” Beside the slogan: an execution of alleged “counterrevolutionaries.”
“Let a Hundred Flower Bloom, A Hundred Schools of Thought Contend” accompanies a photo of the public shearing of an official falsely accused of incest for the “counterrevolutionary” crime of, among other things, sporting a haircut too similar to The Chairman’s.
“This is our Revolution!” students chanted. Zhang describes the photo that she chose to accompany that slogan in another of her posters:
“The man at the center of this photograph is Ouyang Xiang. He was the son of Ouyang Qin, who was the first secretary of Heilongjiang’s provincial Party committee. Because of his position, Ouyang Qin was one of the first targets of the Red Guards. Eventually Qin got the protection of Zhou Enlai, an old friend, and was spared his life.
“His son, however did not receive such protection. He was charged of writing an anonymous letter to the provincial revolutionary committee in defense of his father. His handwriting was identified, and he was charged of being a counterrevolutionary. Struggle sessions were held for him and during one of those, he tried to shout the slogan ‘Long Live Chairman Mao,’ but was quickly censored by a Red Guard who stuffed a glove in his mouth.
“He died several days late after being pushed out of the third-story window of his detainment facility. His death was ruled a suicide.”
Everything Falls Apart
The second set of fragmented, inverted versions of the posters demonstrates the not-so-neat conclusions with which Zhang was left after her journey.
“Upon further study of this era,” she writes, “I realized that the words ‘hypocrisy and ‘perversion’, though accurate are not sufficient to describe the actions and motives of the fragmented, inverted, and turned upside down, just like the politics and lives of the Chinese people at the time. Because it is hard to tell what is going on, it is also hard to tell who is the victim and who is the perpetrator. Though one can tell that a horrible thing is happening, it has become hard to pass individual judgment on the people doing the act. These posters are my attempt to give some sort of explanation for why this happened, without resorting to the simple explanation that my mother has always given me: ‘These people are just evil.’”
In the end, you can understand how a slogan like “Dare to think. Dare to act” must end up a mish-mash.
And yet the most powerful statement may be the most straightforward, the one pictured at the top of this story: Zhang’s grandfather. The smokestacks. And a slogan recited by Chinese children: “Chairman Mao is dearer to us than mother and father.”