Sheep magazine Archive 2: issues 10-17

Wu Bingyuan (eyes closed) with Wang Yongzeng
Photograph: Li Zhensheng
59
For the next six months, I couldn’t get their
faces out of my mind. At that time, Yingxia
and I still hadn’t been provided with an
apartment and lived separately in the dorm.
The toilet was at the end of a long corridor,
and whenever I woke up at night needing
to go to the bathroom, I would walk with
my eyes closed, trying not to bump into the
shoes and small stoves left outside the doors
on both sides of the hallway and trying
not to think of the dead. When I ate in the
cafeteria and they served a local dish like
blood tofu, which was red and gelatinous, I
felt like vomiting.
As I enlarged the photographs of these
executed people in the dim red light of the
darkroom, I quietly spoke to them. I told
them, ‘If your souls are haunted, please
don’t haunt me, too. I’m only tring to help.
I’m making your pictures because I want
to record history. I want people to know
that you were wronged.’ And until this day
– even when I printed the images for this
book in New York – I always say that.
MAY DAY 2016