"Time is a great teacher but, unluckily, it kills all his students"
 <H.Berlioz>

Fifty years have passed since the end of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,and nearly ten since most of these shots were taken by Wang Tong in the countryside of the Henan province.
All I know about the Cultural Revolution is second hand information, some readings and many comments by friends who lived through it-as children, as young students and as intellectuals. Before coming to China in 1986, I, along with most of the European "leftists", had a strongly idealised and distorted image of those events.

The majority of my Chinese friends were born in the Sixties, just like Wang Tong <and myself>, and, being small children, they remember the Cultural Revolution as a pretty playful period-unless they were coming from a 'critical' family background, in which case they had to face violent aggressions against their parents and relatives. Many recall the freedom and the 'scholastic anarchy' which children enjoyed and which allowed them to extensively explore the neighbouring countryside. The countryside was 'the background' of that period: students were sent there from the city, so-called rightist intellectuals had to turn their daily activities into physical labour in the fields, even children were supposed to 'help' the farmers in their seasonal tasks now and then. No wonder, then, that the images Wang Tong has captured are all outside the city. It is true that cities have changed greatly in recent years and that most of the buildings have been destroyed, so that it would be nearly impossible to find walls dating back to that era. Still, all the memories I have collected of those years are related to the countryside, and to me it seems that, unlike now, the protagonists were then the farmers and all the people who were supposed to help and learn from them. While nowadays in China everybody wants to live in big cities and taste the metropolitan lifestyle, stressful and alienating as it may be (because that is the 'new ideal', the latest status-symbol), at that time country people were considered, even in misery, the real heroes, the real builders of the country, both in economic and cultural terms.
Art was supposed to 'serve the people' and be made by the people (just think of the 'Hu Xian peasant painters, for instance) and even after the end of the Cultural Revolution, at the very beginning of the Eighties, the first two times the People's Republic took part in the Venice Biennale, embroidery and paper-cuts made by unknown peasant artists were chosen to represent the country.
 
In the comments Wang Tong has added to his pictures, and in many other people's opinion, there is the strong conviction that young people born after the end of the Cultural Revolution and those (foreigners) who did not live it directly cannot know what it was all about. Those scarce and weathered stencils, statues, slogans, scattered here and there, are all they can refer to, all they can experience of that period. This evidently is my case as well; therefore these visual survivors, and Wang Tong's photographic interpretation of them, are the main key to my personal interpretation.

Visiting villages in the countryside-and Henan is one of my favourite locations for leisurely vagabonding-with some artists friends, whenever we encounter old slogans, 'red stars' or any other relic dating back to 'that' era, I notice a kind of emotion, of reverie, even of nostalgia. It is probably because, as the henanese artist Zhuang Hui has written in one of his most recent installation, "what once was tough has now become nice and warm". This might depend on the fact that we tend to idealise our childhood: a time when even the harshest experience has turned out to be a great lesson, and we are thankful to that "teacher", time, even though he is as "cruel" as Berlioz suggests in his lapidary sentence.

An era in few strokes
Being, as I said, unable to share those feelings-which I understand are both mixed and deep -simply because 'I was not there', I am nevertheless very touched by the atmosphere created by the patterns/symbols, and intrigued by the reaction of the locals.
In some places the images of Mao Zedong-of all the motives, largely the most common-have been scratched out of the wall, leaving a disquieting silhouette (see images 11 and 106) with uneven contours.  Elsewhere the old photos and newspapers have been kept nearly intact, as if time hadn't gone by (no. 87-88). In some cases early images have been covered by others, and now both are slowly fading away, nearly melting together (image 16). Insults have been written on the relics, as to start an anachronistic dialogue between present and past (no. 22-23).
The most common motives, which Wang Tong has 'immortalized' for everyone to see, are stencils of the head or whole body of the great leader Mao, slogans which enthusiastically praise him or referring to a specific diktat, to a definite campaign .
What strikes you about these images is how powerful and synthetic Chinese language can be- and how it can be a strong means of propaganda. A single character, like the universally present "zhong", 'loyal, devote', which is mainly juxtaposed to images of the great leader, may contain, in an elegant graphic composition, a whole sentence, whereas every trait is cleverly made of several characters (image 17-18). The same character is sometimes drawn on a door, and it appears in its completeness only when the door is closed (21). This can be said of Mao¡¯s head in the image number 40; here the head it is inscribed in a circle (ideally, the red sun). The pictorial use of the language is very evident and visually appealing in the image number 42, where two windows become part of the characters forming a common sentence: Mao's 'thought'. The upper parts of these characters, although different, for an experienced eye-as every eye was, thanks to the capillary diffusion and repetition of the same concepts and standardised sentences-could be represented, in a synthetic way, by the empty frame of the windows.
The habit of writing gigantic words on the wall-be it buildings, partitions or others-is still alive in China, now being the sentences either slogans encouraging the "Family planning", the most widespread in the countryside, or commercial advertisements. The evocative power of the characters, so much more concrete and allusive than our alphabet, conveys a feeling of authority, of trustfulness which will influence to a different degree and extent every Chinese. It is difficult to ignore the invasive presence of these 'bodies' in the environment, and, like it or not, their meaning is subtly yet continuously conveyed to the reader.

When there was the help of skilful craftsmen, Mao's calligraphy could be inscribed on a steles for everybody to look at, and in this case, the authoritative aura of the characters enjoys a surplus given by the writer's personal touch, which for a Chinese is just as meaningful as the content (image 116).
Repetitive stencils, printed on walls, doors, architraves and so on, were the most common patterns, but whenever someone who could draw and paint well was around the motives became more creative and personal, although the message was always the same.
Sometimes the portraits of 'ideal' peasants, healthy and smiling with an optimistic look on their face, replaced the omnipresent images of the great leader (no. 77), but the standardised characters, typical of the revolutionary realism style, they were portrayed as, were as rhetoric as those slogans themselves.

Photographing the past
Wang Tong, as most of the photographers I know, is a person with an infinite curiosity regarding the world around him. He is always 'on the move'; always ready to travel to the most remote places, looking for something different, special, something he has not seen yet. Otherwise, he is interested in documenting situations he knows even too well in order to transform them, by means of the camera, into a new world, the world as seen by him.
Although he was born in the Northeast (Manchuria), he moved to Henan as a child, and this region is very familiar to him. Still, he does not consider himself a 'Henanese', nor does he speak Chinese with a Henan accent.
His series of pictures "Mao on the wall" was taken mainly in the mid Nineties. Most likely many of those images are now no longer there-these photos have already become history, precious documents, witnesses of a bygone era.
I believe the good use of the camera allows the photographer to keep a distance from the reality while recreating it in a very personal way. The Mao we see here is Wang Tong's Mao, the Henanese countryside portrayed here is different from the one local peasants face everyday.
In this particular series, Wang Tong has chosen to avoid human presence. Many photos focus on details-on the fading surface of a wall, on the roots growing beside a heroic face. Here we can enjoy the texture of the materials, which has been enriched and has become more evocative with the passing of time thanks to the sharpness of the photos, which gives us a true visual emotion. The juxtaposition of black on white, or rather, the wide range of greys, transforms what could be a simple document into a work of art-a poetic depiction of reality. The artist has then chosen to add some touches of colour to the original images, to make them look more similar to the propaganda posters and paintings of that 'heroic' era.
Everything in those photos describes human existence, but (with one or two exceptions, number 99 and 169) no human being is ever portrayed. These places seem even more decadent and deserted because of the absence of human life. Only animals (and this juxtaposition reminds me of Orwell's "Animal factory") wander at ease in these still shots, showing complete indifference towards the graffiti and the rhetoric words. This indifference becomes, filtered through the lens, irreverent. The photographer expresses himself in a fully visual language. The desolate appearance of these places, the shabbiness of these buildings, are a magnifying mirror which stresses the desuetude in which such 'authoritarian' and exclusive beliefs have fallen into.
Human presence is suggested by few objects and belongings scattered around-it looks as if the inhabitants had just hurried away, leaving behind a trace of their everyday life. Traces which make us realise how poor and limited human aspirations may be-both spiritually and materially.
Monica Dematte
Anguillara Sabazia, 2006.2.22