Negative images

Photographer risked all to document tyranny of China's Cultural Revolution

Mary Voelz Chandler, Rocky Mountain News

Published May 13, 2006 at midnight

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he images that come out of China in 2006 trumpet growth, from massive resettlement forced by the booming Chinese economy to construction projects that herald the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

Forty years ago this year, though, China was not the giant flexing its economic muscles: It was the country in which leader Mao Zedong was clearing a political and ideological path that resulted in a 10-year experiment in terror known as the Cultural Revolution.

Artists were expected to hew the party line, intellectuals and young people were sent to "re-education" camps in the country designed to reacquaint them with "the masses" as "rusticated youth," and political dissent was both quashed and fueled by Mao's violent Red Guards. Newspapers were little more than party mouthpieces.

But a photographer for the Heilongjiang Daily, who at one point was sent to a camp because of his own transgressions, decided not to let the story die. Li Zhensheng hid more than 30,000 negatives he shot during the Cultural Revolution under the floorboards of his home in Harbin.

They now form part of "The Politics of Power: Art & Images From China's Cultural Revolution," an exhibition on view at the Museum of Outdoor Arts. Also on view are numerous political posters and artifacts from various collections, including that of Julie M. Segraves, executive director of the Asian Arts Coordinating Council and curator of the shows. She describes Li's body of work as the most complete visual record of the Cultural Revolution.

Li, who lives in China, will speak at two events here this week in conjunction with the show. And he has quite a story to tell.

A tool to document

Born Sept. 22, 1940, into a poor family in Dalian, Li showed an early aptitude for photography and filmmaking. In August, 1963, he went to work for the Heilongjiang Daily. His father was a member of the Chinese Communist Party; Li later joined to gain better access to photograph party events.

Even then, Mao's policies were changing the way Chinese lived and thought: Some estimate that 20 million people died during his reorganization of the economy during the stunningly misnamed Great Leap Forward of the 1950s, which sent 700 million people to communes.

Then, in 1966, the Party's Central Committee issued what is known as the May 16 Notice, which announced the beginning of the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution.

Li writes, in the 2003 Phaidon book Red-Color News Soldier: "My teacher Wu Qinixian, who had taken photographs of Mao in Yanan in the 1930s, had told me once that the task of the photographer is not only to be a witness to history, but to record history - and I realized that I had to document this tumultuous period. I didn't really know whether I was doing it for the sake of the revolution, for myself, or for the future, but I knew I had to use a camera as a tool to document it."

And document it he did: Among images in the exhibition, which date from 1965 to 1976, Li shows provincial officials and others (even someone at his own newspaper) being humiliated with placards and dunce caps; monks being forced to carry signs that insult Buddhism ("To hell with the Buddhist scriptures, they are full of dog (expletive)"); the execution of eight people for political and other crimes; and young Red Guard members marching.

The exhibition opens with a 1965 self portrait, in which Li used a medium-format camera to photograph himself with his Rolleiflex, and ends with a crowd scene of mourners marking Mao's death on Sept. 9, 1976.

The misery of the Cultural Revolution, where up to 7 million people died and millions more were stripped of their belongings and their beliefs, soon officially was over: Mao's widow, Jiang Quing, and three other officials, known as the Gang of Four, were arrested. The once-denounced Deng Xiaoping was "rehabilitated" and rose to power as a force for modernism.

A secret mission

Li kept shooting photographs, back in the good graces after surviving his own denunciations, being banned from shooting and, with his wife, spending time in a "school of rectification."

He risked it all by hiding his negatives.

"During the Cultural Revolution, photojournalists were not supposed to make so-called negative images - that is, of all the denunciations and torment of the time - and several different orders were given by the propaganda department of the provincial revolutionary committee, as well as the Red Guard organizations at the universities, for photographers to surrender their negatives," he writes. "Most followed this order, and in the end their negatives were all set on fire and destroyed."

But Li processed his own film, and would omit some from what he submitted for print. "These 'negative' negatives I put into small paper pouches, then hid them away in a drawer in my office." He later transferred the negs to his home, and cut a hole in the floor to hide them.

In 1968, Li was attacked by the Red Guard members who now spent time in the newsroom. He had his own "criticism session," where he, like so many others he had shot before, was "put onstage, made to bow, and criticized for over six hours continuously in front of more than 300 of my colleagues. I was accused of wanting to dominate the paper, of attempting to create my own independent 'kingdom,' and of opposing the provincial revolutionary committee."

His crime: "opposing the light," that is, the move by Heilongjiang Province to set up a revolutionary committee. He spent two years in hard labor.

By 1980, Li was teaching; in his book, he is sanguine in his assessment of Mao's legacy, the Mao who taught that "revolution is not a dinner party. It is a violent act of one class overthrowing another."

Li writes: "My generation had not experienced the purge of the landlords or the anti-rightist campaign of the 1950s. We had been raised by the Communist Party and taught to believe that without Mao there would be no new China, that he had liberated us from the old society and sought only the happiness and well-being of the people.

"But he used us. He didn't invoke the old anti-Chiang Kai-shek slogan 'It is right to rebel' to win power, but once he already had it. He used it against his own regime, to purge president Liu Shaoqi. That was the real root of the Cultural Revolution."

Segraves, of the Asian Arts Coordinating Council, heard about Li and his trove of images during one of her frequent trips to China. "It took about a two-year odyssey" to find him, with the idea of organizing a show of his work.

"He is a very easygoing, delightful man," Segraves said.

A large exhibition of his work toured Europe over the past two years, but Segraves decided to organize a smaller show, and to contrast his images with what she called "the fantasy art promoted by the government" - posters that recall a dreamy Mao floating in the heavens or workers united in triumph in the best Socialist Realist tradition. These types of heroic displays have informed 20 years of Chinese art, including Mao's face as Pop icon in work by Andy Warhol.

Segraves calls the section of posters "happy land, the other unreal world," in contrast to the "tough realities, as revealed in Li's photographs."

An exhibition about an event 40 years ago has a purpose, she said.

"I think the Cultural Revolution needs to be remembered in much the same way the bombing at Hiroshima or the Holocaust needs to be remembered, to remind all of us of what damage people can inflict on other human beings for the sake of policies promoted by their governments.

"In China, the generation of the Cultural Revolution is often referred to as the 'lost generation' because they, in fact, did lose so much in so many ways."

The Politics of Power

Art & Images From China's Cultural Revolution

• What: Photographs taken during the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution by photojournalist Li Zhensheng, plus political posters and ephemera from that period and the 2003 film, Morning Sun

• Where and when: Museum of Outdoor Arts, 1000 Englewood Parkway, second floor, Englewood; 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mondays-Thursdays, 9 a.m.-3:30 p.m. Fridays, through June 16

• Of note: Li Zhensheng speaks at two events: a dinner program, 6 to 9 p.m. Monday, University of Denver's Graduate School of International Studies (information: 303-871-4474); the show's opening reception, 5 to 8 p.m. Tuesday, Museum of Outdoor Arts

• Information: 303-806-0444; www.moaonline.org

Mary Voelz Chandler is the art and architecture critic. Chandlerm@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-2677

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