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Proposed US Martin Luther King Memorial Statue, As Planned by Chinese Sculptor, Looks Like 'Socialist Leader'
According to an AP report at Yahoo News "Arts panel criticizes MLK statue design for DC memorial " China's top sculptor has designed a statue of the civil rights leader for an official memorial on the DC mall that some have complained looks more like a dictator than the beloved American minister who led the 60s movement away from legal Jim Crow laws and towards more equality.
Excerpt from picture caption linked from AP article above:
US officials have asked Lei to rework his MLK statue that will stand on the National Mall in Washington, to make it look less like Lenin.
It would seem that anyone who had gone through the Civil Rights era from within the US or even had had their upbringing shaped by the results of this man's efforts would tend to understand his character better than someone raised thousands of miles away.
The picture linked from at the news site mentioned above shows the sculptor and a previous example of his work, very serious and stern looking an giving a lot of the feeling of the Lenin statues here.
Later: I've found pictures of the proposed MLK statue attached to a Washington Post piece "Statue Whittles Away at King's Legacy ". Go to article to see the pictures since they are neither in the public domain, nor offered through Creative Commons. The work is even worse than I imagined. The gallery shows the clay model, a big clay model of King's head, and then a statue that Lei had earlier done of Mao. The eyes in the two men's heads look suspiciously similar.
I hope, also, that the end result will be a full statue, and it's only the clay model that is halfway done.
Excerpt WP article:
The Post author then explains the purpose of socialist realism school of art. He also believes that foreigners doing our monuments are a good thing, and cites the Statue of Liberty.
What he forgets is that "Liberty Enlightening the World" (the actual name of the SOL) was
- Free. It was a gift. The builders did get a patent on the image from the US so they could be the only ones selling miniature images. (Source on patent info Wikipedia)
- Meaningful to Europe as the US represented an escape from repression and economic circumstances which many from Europe had needed for the past 150 years. (I don't see any massive statues popping up in Africa though. That was another locale that got the, admittedly questionable, benefit of Europe emptying itself of excess population. There must be some kind of point to be made there.)
Neither of these conditions seems to be inherent in the Chinese MLK statue.
If they had to go Chinese they should have gotten the men and women who constructed the Tiananmen Square "Goddess of Democracy". It was designed by art students so not divorced from the art community, and had a lot more feeling for the yearning for true liberty and equality than any sculptor approved by the Chinese government and steeped in the tradition of socialist-realism could manage.
Interestingly San Fransisco seems to have a copy of Tiananmen's Goddess. My surprise shows how long it's been since I've been there. This guy has some pictures of it at Flickr.com. Unfortunately, the backview appears to be the only one of the original available on the web.
Tag Related Neighborhood Posts
I have a dream
Politics is like Marriage.
"Tiananmen Square Generation"
"Tiananmen Square Transformation"
I have a nano-dream
Zero Tolerance.
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