An ‘all-purpose’ Pillar of Shame? Now we know
- Sculptor Jens Galschiot has admitted the faces on the infamous statue were not even Chinese and it was not specifically created for the June 4, 1989 crackdown. That adds another myth to the many others surrounding the ‘Tiananmen Square massacre’, starting with the name itself
I often wondered why the faces of the burning souls on the Pillar of Shame look nothing like Chinese or even Asian. After all, it was supposed to commemorate the “Tiananmen Square massacre”. Now, thanks to the furore over the removal of the statue from the University of Hong Kong campus, its creator, the Danish sculptor Jens Galschiot, has been forced to clarify.
In a news interview, he admitted his statue was not originally meant to be tailor-made for a specific event. He first started the work in 1994, which, he said, was made of faces from different races. He displayed it in Italy for the first time the next year. He then approached different groups from different countries. Unsurprisingly, there were no takers, until the now-defunct Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China offered to take it. It is not clear why the non-Chinese faces never bothered them.
Now I don’t mean to accuse Galschiot of self-promotion. Perhaps he was just being creative, as artists tend to be, in creating an artwork open to interpretations. However, the whole sorry saga of the statue spanning more than two decades does add another myth to many surrounding the “massacre”.
Journalists are often accused of not letting facts get in the way of a good story. To an extent, that is true. But it happens more rarely than people think, because there usually are not that many good stories, especially those for the ages such as the “Tiananmen Square massacre”.
When it comes to that kind of historical event, some people, not just journalists, believe certain inconvenient facts may be ignored for the “greater truth”. Now, I am not denying brutal killings took place on the night of June 4, 1989, in Beijing. But, as Orville Schell and John Delury wrote in Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-first Century, “unlike the avenues leading into the square, where the carnage had been great that night, the heart of the Central Kingdom was finally cleared without any known loss of life”.
Admittedly, the “massacre at the Gate of Heavenly Peace” is much catchier, in any language. And there is the iconic “Tankman” photo. People tend to assume the roll of tanks were moving in for the kill, but were stopped by one man. Actually, they were evacuating from the square – where there were no killings – and the man was, for inexplicable reasons, blocking their exit.