CUHK Series:The Reinvention of Ancestors

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As the Communist Party began to reassess its recent history, the Landlord Manor Museum has become a court- room, the model work now a case to be judged. Showing his own penchant for political theater, Liu Xiaofei has done much more than give personal tours to the occasional academic or journalist. The online photographs of the event portray a Liu Xiaofei triumphant, leading a parade of a hundred through the cobblestone streets of Anren with an elderly man on each arm, one a tenant farmer and the other a hired hand.

Bodies also served as evidence: In the Cultural Revolution, Downloaded from mcx. Photos courtesy of Liu Xiaofei. They took down the signboards pro- moting class struggle and replaced the torture instruments room with a gal- lery of porcelain Interviews with Wu Hongyuan, August 26 and 27, An official booklet on the Landlord Manor that he coauthored in referred to the Rent Collection Courtyard as an artistic achievement and explained that the opium storage room had once been mistaken as a water dungeon. One seeks full redress of Liu Wencai as an individual, and the second claims that the rehabilitation of this representative of the landlord class would unset- tle the very foundation of the Communist Party.

The opposing camp is represented by a half-dozen retired cadres, includ- ing the local party secretary who had presided over land reform. If Xiaoshu wanted to overturn the Downloaded from mcx. Xiaoshu has since turned to other causes, and as the old cadres have begun to pass away, Liu Xiaofei stands alone.

The tour he conducted on our visit to Anren reflects this single- minded passion. Then the illiterate Cao was forced to imprint his thumb on a judg- ment that sent him to prison.

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After he was released in the Reform era, he tried to clear his name. Imprisoned in clay, Cao Keming was first destroyed by the revolution and then forced to lend his image to its glorification, a soul twice stolen. In some cases, he attacked the logic of the exhibition, past and pres- ent: If the Rent Collection Courtyard statues really depict starving peasants, why does this one look so well-fed?

Beneath the tangle of these narratives and their crisscrossing logic, Liu Xiaofei denounces the Landlord Manor Museum and the suffering that such propaganda both masked and extended. It matters less that the dragon bed was fabricated and more that it was made at enormous expense at a time Downloaded from mcx. If the Cao Keming story is true, then clearing the name of the Landlord Manor is required to appease his hungry ghost. His momentary day in court must be purchased with a thirty-yuan ticket.

Still, Liu Xiaofei believes that his truth-telling has resulted in changes to the narrative, and historian Guo Wu shows how images of the evil landlord have been and con- tinue to be deconstructed Wu, In addition to generic souvenirs, these shops offered up the landlord for sale. Photo by Jie Li. In some cases, people like the snack shop proprietor were able to profit from their affiliation with Liu Wencai. The Landlord Manor Museum, as the preceding section has suggested, struggled to reinvent itself in the s. They even held fashion shows, hosted a martial arts school, and opened a zoo with tigers, leopards, and snakes.

On our visit to Anren in this museum was the first stop on our combination ticket, and the entry was flanked on the left and right by rep- licas for sale. The Rent Collection Courtyard, too, was described by tour guides in art connoisseurial terms—as an internationally renowned artwork that won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale. Some were even underwhelmed: Funding his collection fever with his real estate fortune made since the s, Fan Jianchuan receives hundreds of containers of artifacts a year from his nationwide network of flea market contacts.

In his 6, square meters of warehouse space, for example, Fan Jianchuan holds 30 tons of handwritten materials, 20, dia- ries, a hundred thousand propaganda posters, and millions of Mao badges Fan, Photo by Denise Y. Despite the supermarket metaphor and the sheer quantity of objects, it would be a simplification to say that the Jianchuan Museum Cluster is Downloaded from mcx. Photos by Jie Li. Though in interviews Fan Jianchuan was quick to say that only future generations shall judge history, inherent in his curatorial practice are his opinions and sentiments.

Turning exhibitions of artifacts into installation art, Fan shows off the sheer quantity of his collections through an aesthetic of the mass ornament, arranging Mao badges into four giant Mao faces, turning seals into paving stones, clocks into a catacomb-like wall display, and mirrors into labyrinths.

By virtue of their arrangement, the objects take on new rhetorical powers. Unlike Liu Xiaofei, a lone petitioner, Fan Jianchuan has access to money and power, which means he does not merely challenge history in an official museum. With his private capital, he has built and curated his own growing museum empire. With his military connections, he escaped arrest Downloaded from mcx.

To help navigate local politics Fan has a personal advisor in Wu Hongyuan, a retiree of the Landlord Manor and the Bureau of Propaganda. The images of agricul- tural utopia, clearly doctored and bearing their original captions, would appear ironic to anyone vaguely acquainted with the famine that ensued. The penultimate room in the Museum of Sent-Down Youth holds documents of strange cases such as accidental deaths, all with names blocked out with strips of yellow paper.

Representing a tenuous edge between official and unofficial history, such guerilla exhibits offer a counternarrative, however fragmentary, of a private museum under official surveillance. In some ways, these guerilla exhibits serve as placeholders for the muse- ums Fan Jianchuan still wants to build.

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In the meantime, he envisions future museums centered on still taboo topics: On the sur- face Fan Jianchuan is blithe about politics and willing to bide his time, sympathizing with the censors who have no yardstick for his museum clus- ter. Paper lasts a millennium. Stones and metal ten thousand years!

Or are they so devoid of context that the socialist icon disintegrates, clay to dust? This narrative of Anren proposes a third interpretation. Indeed, over time Anren has enlivened the past to address contemporary concerns. Simultaneously it has been subject to market reforms and the changing tastes of the newly rich tourist. Museums in China have been, and are, living spaces.

From the Republican to the Reform era, the museum town of Anren has refracted multiple layers of modern Chinese history. Its transformation chal- lenges dichotomies between public and private, fact and fiction, secular and sacred, material and spiritual, serious and playful. At the same time, the top- down narratives of the Mao period have given way to post-socialist counter- narratives. Hong Kong University Press, , pp. Kaisa Publication, , pp. Martin's Press, co-authors: Kegan Paul International, , pp. A Year Later, Singapore: Times Academic Press, , pp.

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