Unacknowledged by the art community or society at large, in November 2016 Hamburg saw the first large scale exhibition of an art project to tackle the public memory — or lack therof — of the traumatic “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”, unleashed by Mao Zedong in 1966. As far as I know, the project initiated by Ni Shaofeng, in which he and his friend Deng Huaidong appropriated propaganda photos made during the Cultural Revolution and transformed them into disfigured large scale ink installations and oil paintings, was the first of its kind in the world.
I was lucky to be able to accompany most of the preparatory work leading up to the exhibition with my camera. Now that all the films have been developed and the negatives sorted, I want to share the impressions I captured of the exhibition.
You can find my photos documenting the exhibition here, or through the menu of this homepage.
