The Blood of the World

The Blood of the World, 250×180cm, 2006

In 2016, ten years after a photo work created in 2006 confiscated was unveiled. “Wang Qingsong, whose photographs are a mix of Western and Chinese cultural icons, works on the grand scale of a movie director, setting up elaborate scenarios with dozens of models in order to take a single picture (he is often compared to Gregory Crewdson and Jeff Wall). Blood of the World was to be a monumental work, packed with reenactments of scenes of battle from famous paintings in western art history and infamous news photographs, from Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People to Eddie Adams’ famous Vietnam-era Execution of a Vietcong Prisoner. The blood of the World, 180x250cm, 2006-2016“To make The Blood of the World, Wang spent six months designing a set that took a month to build: 3,000 feet of mud and dirt, with towering hills and deep foxholes in front of a painted backdropof a smoky sky. On the day of the shoot, he added several horses, two tanks, a truck, animal carcasses and 200 actors, many of them naked and smeared with paint to play the part of cadavers in the battle scene. On an extremely cold day in November 2006, Wang Qingsong took his place atop a 50-foot-tall scaffold overlooking the set, which occupied an unheated hangar in the middle of an agricultural development about an hour outside of Beijing. Like a very calm general, he passed orders to his crew who then moved the extras into place. Everyone, especially those asked to disrobe, was freezing. The scene took more than four hours to set up. The shoot was supposed to be top secret. In China it is illegal for more than 20 people to gather without a permit. Nudity is also illegal, even if in no way pornographic. I was there that day, as was Matthew Collings and a BBC crew, who were covering the event for the British TV program This Is Civilization.“ – Barbara Pollack, from Artnet.

https://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/pollack/wang-qingsong1-25-11.asp