Sheep magazine Archive 2: issues 10-17

58
Thanks to Li, seemingly anonymous faces and
places take on names and identities. Li shows
the surreal events to be all too real. Through
his lens, these people and occurrences from
so far away are made at once personal and
universal, and all too familiar, reminding us of
events in Chile, Rwanda, Bosnia, Afghanistan,
and Iraq. The Cultural Revolution unleashed
the frustration and anger of a new generation
eager to change the world, but the force was
harnessed and used by those in power for a
decidedly different purpose: its own complete
domination. In the late 1960s, student riots
erupted in other cities on other continents, but
they never resulted in the same premeditated
violence initiated by those at the helm of the
Chinese state.
We will be forever grateful to Li for having
risked so much to doggedly preserve the
images in this book at a time when most of his
colleagues agreed to allow their negatives to
be destroyed. Li was a young man in search of
himself, as seen in his many self-portraits in this
volume, who wished to leave behind a trace
of his own existance as well as his dreams of
individuality and a better world. History is indeed
Li Zhensheng’s paramount concern and this
book’s main purpose: to remember and revisit
those haunting and tragic events that were the
Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
Robert Pledge
An exerpt ... Li writes:
Three months after our wedding, on 5
April 1968, I photographed an execution
of seven men and one woman. Six –
including the woman and her lover,
who had murdered her husband – were
‘ordinary’ criminals. The other two men
were technicians at the Harbin Electric Meter
Factory who had published a flyer entitled
‘Looking North,’ which the authorities
interpreted as ‘looking northward toward
Soviet revisionism.’ They were condemned
as counter-revolutionaries. One was
named Wu Bingyuan, and when he heard
the sentence, he looked into the sky and
murmured, ‘This world is too dark’; then
he closed his eyes and never in this life
reopened them. All eight were put on the
backs of trucks in pairs, driven through
town, then out to the countryside northwest
of Harbin. There, on the barren grounds of
the Huang Shan Cemetry, they were lined
up, hands tied behind their backs, and
forced to kneel. They were all shot in the
back of the head.
No one asked me to take close-ups of the
bodies, but that’s waht I did, and because
I had only a 35mm wide-angle lens, I had
to get very close, so close I could smell the
fishy smell of blood and brains.
SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER TEN