‘Mao on the Wall’ tells the story in pictures of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).  An abundance of portraits and slogans; signs and symbols which dominated the Chinese political scene for over ten years.  Though now long weathered and faded, they continue to communicate powerful stories from the past, ambiguously bearing witness to a bygone era.
　　As a witness to that decade long incident, I was both a person who lived with those images as well as one of the countless thousands who created them, produced reproduced in every corner of the nation.  My memory of that experience remains very vivid and yet very distant.  I can still clearly remember cutting the stencils, the finishing touches of a knife on a variety of paper; craft-paper, drawing-paper, old newsprint, even cardboard.  I remember the sweeping brushes, the smell of ink and paint, lime white-wash.  I remember the physical discomfort of rendering those images, the awkward postures, the raised and bent limbs.  I can also remember how I struggled composing the Chinese character ‘zhong,’ rendered as a composite of slogans which when read at a distance comes off as a unifying symbol, meaning very simply ‘loyalty.’  During all those years when formal study ceased in order to carry out revolution, I lived with the proliferation of Big Character Posters.  I both participated in and witnessed criticism (pi dou) of my peers, endless sloganeering (youxing), physical confrontations (wudou), roaming the nation spreading revolution (chuanlian), beating, smashing and looting (da za qiang).  Eventually I became quite expert at rendering the Chairman’s portrait as well as his slogans.  Called by the Party to work in the countryside, I left the city and stayed in eastern Henan Province, making the transformation to peasant in order to demonstrate my loyalty to the Party and to my Leader.  My labor included shoveling mud on the banks of the Yangtze, plowing, threshing and brick-making as well as driving a dung cart in winter, this latter constituting light labor.  From winter until the next harvest we had no flour in our daily diet, subsisting on dried potato and corn porridge.  When someone returned to the village with two bottles of soy sauce we considered it a great occasion.  As so-called intellectual kids, we were well taken care of by the Party; the farmers however enjoyed no such protection and lived for the most part, a miserable life.  As the revolution proceeded, people became baptized in the endless rounds of meetings and criticisms, denouncing revisionism and contrasting past miseries with present joys.  Everyone was trained and accustomed to communicate in the revolutionary lexicon. To mention a few examples: 　　“The more you learn the more reactionary you become,” or “We’d rather have socialist grass over capitalist seeds.”  The portraits and slogans are the visual representation and highly compressed expression of this revolutionary lexicon, finally becoming the science of that very special period.
　　Those who conceived the Cultural Revolution may have started out with utopian aspirations but the result was nothing short of a cultural disaster, deconstructing civilization;
　　“Any civilization’s deconstruction is an abnormal societal reaction against convention, in order to confront the inertia of the latter; Pandora’s Box is likely to be opened releasing the irrational passion and zeal of the masses in a downward spiral of destruction.  The general public can bear it for a time but will never be able to regard the abnormal as a rational expression.”
　　-Xueqin Zhu from the book ‘Sound of Wind, Rain and Reading’ 
　　－By going to such an extreme the goal of societal deconstruction ultimately fails and is replaced by yet another social reform.  This is the situation in present day China, our moving through tremendous changes has engendered a social metamorphosis.  The Cultural Revolution has been totally negated, with the Open Door Policy becoming the basis for social development.  Class struggle has given way to fierce market forces, competition; revolutionary portraits have become tools for advertising; political activities replaced by a craze for fashion.  In this way the Cultural Revolution and its spiritual aspirations, has ceded to the pursuit of worldly happiness and excess as seen in the proliferation of karaoke, disco, Hollywood, soap operas, McDonalds and KFC, fashion shows, beauty pageants, rock and roll, jeans and mini-skirts, Cocoa Cola, haute couture, money speculation, lotteries, plastic surgery, supermarkets, bars, wedding photography studios and celebrities of all kinds.  A carnival atmosphere now exists and has rendered the Cultural Revolution remote and vague, and yet clearly seen through the images of Wang Tong.
　　History cannot be forgotten.  The Cultural Revolution was a disaster for the Chinese nation; it represents a painful experience able to yield moral insights, and more; it has become a spiritual pillar, providing sustenance in these modern times as we move head first in the pursuit of affluence.  With the Cultural Revolution now an indelible part of our history, there is no stepping back from the Open Door Policy.  However, just as we managed to pass through that earlier troubled period, so then are we able to navigate our contemporary issues, unemployment, the sharp contrast between rich and poor, the inadequate development of democracy and the rule of law.  Our having prevailed through the period of the Cultural Revolution has prepared us for the overwhelming materialism and shallowness of worldly happiness to which corruption is part and parcel.  The transformation to a market-oriented society (and all that entails) is tempered by the memory of the Cultural Revolution and the reminder that we are a persevering people with deep spiritual roots.
　　As I belong to the generation which directly experienced the Cultural Revolution, I am constantly reminded of our role as witnesses to this troubled time, it is our burden to bear.  Ours is a generation of ideals, an idealism which can be paradoxical when measured against the movement and changes of our modern times.  As our generation shoulders a sense of responsibility, of mission, we tend to be more cynical.  In fact we deeply treasure the achievements of the last two decades, but are unaccustomed to the singular aspirations for wealth and success which dominate life in today’s China.  We were underprivileged as children and young people, a malnourished childhood which has ushered in a difficult middle-age life, but we cannot remain idle.  The experience of the Cultural Revolution has endowed our generation with special characteristics as evident in the photographs of Wang Tong.
　　Can time truly erase memory? Our experiences seem to have faded, we, the generation who grew up with the Cultural Revolution. There was strong condemnation of that period during the 1980’s, and then again some weak reflection transpired during the 90’s, but now it seems that those years 1966-76 have been totally forgotten.  We care more and more about the new materialism sweeping the nation, growing more and more ignorant about the past, as with the future, preferring instead the perpetual present.  It is in this mood that Wang Tong made his pilgrimage to Central China’s Henan Province, leaving behind him the insanity of urban life to set his focus on the poor and under-developed people of this region; people who despite their poverty still carry rich cultural reminisces.  He made himself a witness to this disastrous incident by capturing those repetitive and recurring images, slogans and icons.  His grey tones tend to focus on the mid-ground, leaving the imagination to clarify the rest.  The impact of his photographs feels akin to playing a long discarded harp, producing a ghostly but recognizable resonance.  These images may or may not be testimonials or reflections, but they are most certainly an interrogation:  What and how did all this happen?  Our generation must and should provide some answers to these questions and it is a sad thing to consider how short our efforts have fallen. No deep or historical reflection has evolved from this painful experience, no admissions of guilt, no confessions, no response to tearful accusations. We have rented our responsibilities to society but we lack the courage for further self-examination.  Thus the identity of the witness has shifted to that of the onlooker, the participant to that of the victim.  While denouncing this cultural disaster, we are simultaneously seeking condolences; this is the fault running through our generation, making us strong and yet weak, deep thinking but shallow.  If our experiences do not evolve into a meaningful accumulation of spiritual we will have gained nothing from the period.
　　“It feels good to forget history” (Milan Kundera): It is one way we indulge ourselves in worldly happiness, and a brick on the road to forgetting is one step closer to repeating.  The whole series of Wang tong’s photographic work, ‘Mao On The Wall’, is a wake-up, an alarming reminder forbidding us to forget while bidding us to remember.
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Translation by Sui & Lambrou
 

作者：Lambrou