Lying just beneath the skin of the terse explanations, the exhibits of battle armour, shrunken heads and ploughing implements of every museum the world over, a narrative crackles. Museums collect, gather, encapsulate, centralize; they are neat little boxes of story, plucking chaotic elements from a moving world and fixing them in a new, artificial framework. Virtually nothing, despite common wisdom, belongs in one.
More often than not, a museum’s story is told through its exhibits, allowing for a certain level of give and take between visitors and curators. While the grouping of items, their explanations and other such manipulations will hold a certain sway over our perceptions, we remain free as creatures of the imagination to conjure up our own images, fill in our own blanks (and ignore those damned boxes of dry, insistent text).
In places where the story is threatened, contested or remains fluid, museums are often co-opted into becoming focal points that pin down the meaning of key points or events, lest they pull a protean escape act and leave the threads of the stories to which they attach flapping untied, dangerous. In such places, the emphasis shifts from showing to telling, and exhibits become no more than props. Subsumed in importance by the story they are supposedly telling, they often revert awkwardly to their original form; artefacts redundant, out of place.
Just occasionally, however, the exhibits themselves fight back, undermining the stories with their own truths.
Lodged in the damp, spring flatlands of
Replacing the wattle and straw shacks of previous years, lines of identical blue-roofed concrete houses are linked by immaculately metalled roads. Bar the presence of a few soggy black dogs, the place is completely deserted. Along a lane from the marble wasteland of the coach park (built, we are informed, to coincide with a visit by state leaders last year) stands an exhibition hall commemorating the events that sparked the restoration of land ownership to individual households in the late 70s, a process over which controversy continues to rumble.
Here, exhibits are not so much presented as created in situ. To the left of the door sprawls an enormous tableau depicting that fateful night when the farmers of Xiaogangcun got together and decided, in spite of the huge risks it would involve, that they wanted their land back. The mural is a bizarre combination of styles – the composition and poses of the subjects is lifted straight out of Victorian melodrama (think Martin or Alma-Tadema), but the cartoonish grotesques that stare out from between piles of straw or gaggles of chickens lend the whole thing an air of bizarre, deflated camp.
At the end of a long gallery, this sense of bathos is revisited in a parody of victory memorials the world over; impossibly muscular figures swarm across a bronze bas-relief in a display of brash, brazen socialist realism (the exhibition hall was completed in 2008). Flanking them on either side, a crude half-verse repeats itself: “Contract system! Contract system! Forging on, no turning back! Pay the state its due, make sure the collective has enough, and the rest you keep!” (altogether now: “aaaand it’s no, nay, never…”).
But despite its symbolic position at the heart of the gallery, the glorified image it presents is punctured by the rows of photographs that unfurl next to it. Dressed in t-shirts or polo tops, caught at home or out in the street, posed, but not elaborately, stand the life-sized contemporary images of Xiaogangcun’s surviving reformers. A run of identical family names belies the continued thriving of the old lineage structures (if Mao had really wanted to nail shut the coffin of traditional China, he would have done well to consider getting rid of surnames). In the midst of a sea of carefully orchestrated political narrative, they are captivating in their ordinariness.
It is tempting to romanticise; the two rows of open-seeming smiles and thick, greying eyebrows conjure a sense of a hard life, well-lived. The museum, the model village, the historical ‘event,’ all recede into the background. What remains is the reality of a group of people with goals far more modest than setting their nation on the shining path of development. Thirty years ago, they did a very brave thing. Then, they got on with their lives.
