Preenactment, 2008, 4 channel installation
The stage sets for these photos were elaborate models built as facsimiles of progress—didactic visual instructions for a semi-literate rural population on how to modernize and industrialize the land.
What distinguishes these photographs—made for a series of nationalist picture books during the tailend of China’s Cultural Revolution—from those of other Communist countries generating propaganda campaigns in the 1970s, is that 35 years later, reality has finally evolved to bear semblence to them. Minus the smiling workers, the industrial and agricultural advancement that Mao envisioned and painstakingly modeled—but which never took hold in his lifetime—preenacted what began only after his death, and slowly, as China gradually opened its markets to the global economy, and could modernize and industrialize for real.
