For some reason, a few people are irritated that the Martin Luther King Jr. statue recently unveiled in Washington, D.C. (just in time for The Most Important News Story Of 2011) was made of Chinese granite, carved by a Chinese artist and assembled by Chinese workers. Huh.
Martin Luther King memorial made in China
…there has been controversy over the choice of Lei Yixin, a 57-year-old master sculptor from Changsha in Hunan province, to carry out the work. Critics have openly asked why a black, or at least an American, artist was not chosen and even remarked that Dr King appears slightly Asian in Mr Lei’s rendering.
Mr Lei, who has in the past carved two statues of Mao Tse-tung, one of which stands in the former garden of Mao Anqing, the Chinese leader’s son, carried out almost all of the work in Changsha.
More than 150 granite blocks, weighing some 1,600 tons, were then shipped from Xiamen to the port of Baltimore, and reassembled by a team of 100 workmen, including ten Chinese stone masons brought over specifically for the project.
Interesting resume the artist has: Mao, MLK and Obama. Hmmmm…
(Pictured: rumored early maquette for the MLK memorial)
3 Responses to “MLK Jr.: Made In China”
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Really doesn’t surprise me. I don’t think there is/was a Black or American artist who has the skill to pull the MLK project off. I’m willing to bet that they tried going with a Black artist first but couldn’t find anyone skilled enough. Then they probably tried going American and ran into the same problem.
Really, the problem has nothing to do with race or nationality but in finding someone with the skill to do this kind of project. There are not too many people who are skilled in stone masonry and stone carving. Sadly, it’s a dying art.
It’s like you, Scott, you probably know stuff that these new Aerospace Engineering graduates don’t know. If only the aerospace companies needed some of the old (and obsolete) skills you needed you might be a valuable commodity.
I’ve noticed with the progress of technology, certain other technologies and methodologies are lost.
> I don’t think there is/was a Black or American artist who has the skill to pull the MLK project off.
I find that difficult to believe. While sculpting in stone is very likely not the world-straddling mega-business it once was, it’s not like art is going away. Old forms of artistic expression are not susceptible to obsolescence like old forms of engineering or materials design. What I imagine happened is that the Chinese sculpters are simply *cheaper* that equivalent Americans ones of whatever race. It’s a problem I’m quite familiar with… I cannot possibly hope to compete with the Asian sweatshops in the aircraft/spacecraft display model business. So I’m pushed way into the back in a far, little-known niche.
My biggest problem with the MLK memorial is that it really does look like a stock-standard Marxist Great Leader statue, Mao or Stalin, with MLK’s head on it. He just looks angry and ready to lead an army of Commissars to wipe out the kulacks.
They were explaining the reverberations on the news yesterday; apparently these east coast faults are all very old (as in hundreds of millions of years) and not having any deep magma associated with them, the shockwaves travel through the rock without getting buffered any, causing them to ring like a bell for a considerable time after the quake as if the whole area was one huge block of rock.
The Moon reacted the same way when they crashed the jettisoned S-IVB stages into it during the Apollo missions.