Unimaginable that — except as explicit satire — 100 writers and artists from the former Soviet Union would inscribe by hand today the loathesome principles set forth by Zhdanov and enforced thereafter by his goon squads. What a bizarre reaffirmation of a long-discarded set of prescriptions and proscriptions this book represents, then — a self-abasing modern version of the obligatory “loyalty dance” performed under his portrait as a morning ritual by all mainland Chinese citizens at the height of Mao’s cult of personality. […]
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My own bit part in this transformation, via involvement in the touring exhibition “The Silent Strength of Liu Xia,” came to the foreground last Saturday, June 9, in Hong Kong. The show, for which I now serve as co-curator and tour manager, had its first-ever opening on Chinese soil: a featured role in the 2012 Annual Event of the Independent Chinese PEN Center (ICPC). […] You can attribute the paucity of posts here over the past two months to my concentration on initiating a new traveling exhibition project: “The Secret Strength of Liu Xia: Photographs 1996-1999.” Currently ending its 3-month run at the Italian Academy at Columbia University in New York City, it goes next to Hong Kong, thence to Taipei, after that to Madrid, and returns to the U.S. toward the end of this year. Its tour will continue (if I have my way) until Liu Xia and her husband are free. […] I’ve tracked the “pepper-spray copy” story here at Photocritic International because it’s as vivid and immediate an example of the potency of citizen journalism via the lens media as a commentator on lens culture like myself could want. I’ve said, from the beginning, that without Lt. John Pike’s bring-it-on turning of this situation into a police-brutality photo op in front of a crowd of amateur paparazzi, heads would not have started to roll at UC Davis and he would not have become an international symbol of uniformed thuggery. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
Slow Boat in China (3)
Because Liu Xia now lives under house arrest, incommunicado save for periodic visits with her mother, I can’t run any decisions past her, as I would automatically in organizing a show by a living artist. Thus I have to trust to my instincts, along with my sense of what I’d want others to do with my work if I were in her shoes. […]