Photographer's mission to remember Mao
Posted: Tuesday, October 27, 2009 9:45 AM
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Beijing, China
By NBC News' Bo Gu
BEIJING – Thirty-three years after his death, Mao Zedong is still a god to many in China. And you can see him everywhere.
He's mostly standing, in a military uniform or a long buttoned-up winter coat, sometimes wearing his symbolic little red-starred army hat, usually waving his right arm high up to the air as if giving a victory gesture or ordering his army to march forward. Occasionally you see him posed as a deep thinker with his hands behind the back, or even sitting on a chair looking into some mysterious future.
He mainly stands in big cities’ center squares, overlooking senior citizens doing tai chi in dawn light or children running around in a park; many times he stands in military barracks or factory blocks, supervising his soldiers in exercise and workers on the assembly line; sometimes he waves his big hand in universities, reminding the students of his renowned remark “you youth are the sun at 8 a.m. or 9 a.m., you are the future of the country"; now and then, he makes surprise appearances in a dingy local clinic, a small Sichuan restaurant, or in the middle of a rundown low-rise housing complex.
He’s mostly cement, gray and stiff, sometimes marble, white and spotless, occasionally bronze, yellow and shining.
There are hundreds of these statues of the late founder of the People’s Republic of China across the country. And Cheng Wenjun, an urban sculpture designer and photographer, made it his mission, which he began in 1997, to make a record of every one.
Cheng’s inspiration started during a business trip 30 years ago in the western city of Kashgar in China’s Xinjiang province. He saw a Mao statue in a remote Uighur region among burka-covered Uighur women and domed mosques near the border of China, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. He was deeply touched by the contrast of such an odd juxtaposition. Then in 1992 Cheng saw another one in Hainan province, the island on mainland China’s southern tip, only 172 miles from Vietnam.
“You know Mao used to be our leader. Now his statues are like watching guards in China, I’m just so impressed,” he said “Mao statues are also a critical part of China’s sculpture history.”
The first Mao statue was erected in May 1967, at Tsinghua University, at the beginning of the ten-year long “Cultural Revolution” initiated by Mao himself. During the next three years the whole country was drawn into fanatical worship of Mao and building his statues everywhere was a way to show loyalty to the Great Leader.
Mao allegedly was against the idea and said he preferred to recycle the materials (back then a lot of statues were made of steel) into building airplanes rather than being made into a guard on shift everyday. However, the leader’s modesty wasn’t taken seriously and local governments in China competed over sizes and materials used in their statues.
In 1978, at the end of the Cultural Revolution and as China began opening up and and reforming, China's new leader, Deng Xiaoping, ordered the mass demolition of Mao statues all over the country. At that time, more than 2,000 Mao statues had been erected across China. Demolition work had to be done at night to avoid provoking devout Mao followers, but the task was obviously not completed.
Cheng Wenjun has taken pictures of 210 Mao statues, in 130 cities and towns in mainland China. He’s often impressed by the stories behind the statues. Very often he doesn’t just take pictures – he talks to sculptors, takes notes, writes down the stories behind the scene, even films what he sees in the towns where he can find Mao statues.
“No Chinese can ignore Mao Zedong. I hope all of us can view him objectively,” says Cheng, explaining his passion for Mao statue pictures. “Looking at history is just like taking pictures, you don’t want to do it with absolute frontlighting or backlighting. You always need more details, and I hope people can view Mao in an objective way just like how we should view history.”
Many sculpture workshops in China are still building and selling Mao statues, usually just bust statues or in small sizes, to new Mao believers who deem his image as a blessing or a gigantic amulet.
Cheng’s next target is a 105 foot tall statue of Mao’s young head (32-year-old Mao in 1925), still under construction in Changsha, close to his birthplace in China’s southern capital of Hunan province.
