Ideal 10
Wang Guofeng
王国锋
Production date
2007
Object Detail
Media
pigment print
Measurements
57.5 x 233 cm
Notes
The ten photographs in Wang Guofeng’s ‘Ideal’ series depict the Ten Grand Buildings in Beijing, constructed in 1959 to mark the tenth anniversary of the 1949 Communist Revolution. Constructed at the time of Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’, now estimated to have caused the deaths of up to 40 million people in the resulting famine, these monuments to a socialist utopia render the individual human being miniature and insignificant. Shot at very high resolution, with people and cars edited out and the tiny figure of the artist dressed in a Mao suit inserted into each picture, the photographs are a cautionary tale about the unchecked power of ideology. These overblown socialist edifices – as here, with the grand, Stalinist-looking façade of the Beijing Hotel – now seem like relics of a lost civilisation.
Accession number
2011.097