May 27th, 1989. It’s the end of the Cold War: it would be a few months before the fall of the Berlin wall in November. It has been already more than a month since the student-led demonstrations for democracy in Beijing. The protest organizers give a group of 15 students art students from the Central Academy of Fine Arts the task of creating a statue.
Inspiration
According to Tsao Hsingyuan, the group was influenced by Vera Mukhina, a Soviet sculptor famous for her work Soviet Worker and Kolkhoz Woman, and that the similarities with the Statue of Liberty were not intentional: in fact, the artists resisted the organizer’s call to resemble the New York monument.
Despite the intentions of the artists, the statues for many resembled the Statue of Liberty: “To me, it definitely recalls the Statue of Liberty but, also, it definitely distinguished itself from it,” said Perry Link, an American working at the time at National Academy of Science’s office in Beijing.
The Birth of a Simulacra
The 10-meter tall figure was made of Styrofoam and plaster and installed by the sunrise of May 30th, while Beijing was under martial law and lasted until June 4th when it was destroyed by the Chinese Communist government’s authorities. With the destruction of the original, the simulacra of the Goddess of Democracy was born.
A contested sign
Despite the original statue being destroyed, many replicas have been built around the world, with the statue symbolizing resistance toward the Chinese Communist government.
Washington D.C., 2007. A replica of the Goddess of Democracy is built with another name: Victims of Communism Memorial. The quote on the pedestal of the statue references the very much contested “death-tool of communism” as calculated in The Black Book of Communism, a book whose political bias and dishonest scholarship by the editor of the book Stéphane Courtois was contested also by the other main contributors to said book.
Around 2014 a yellow umbrella was attached to the Goddess of Democracy replica built in 1991 at the University of British Columbia (UBC), with the presumable intent of connecting the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests to the 2014 Hong Kong protests given the nature of both as struggles for democracy against the Chinese Communist government.
Curiously a similar 10-meter statue was built during the Hong Kong protest, the Umbrella Man, that for many resembled the Goddess of Democracy. The author, an art student identifying himself by the name Milk, said that the resemblance was not intentional, but that he understands the comparison.
Conclusion
The Goddess of Democracy appears to have undergone quite a semiotic journey as a sign. It was first inspired by the works of a Soviet author, whose most famous work is a statue with a man and a woman holding a hammer and sickle that represented the Soviet pavilion at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris. It then became a symbol representing the struggle for democracy during the Tienanmen Square and Hong Kong protests. Furthermore, in Washington D.C. it was used to represent a broader anti-communist message, and thus also an anti-Soviet message (which some might find ironic given the Soviet inspiration for the statue) and not specifically an anti-Chinese government message.
Interestingly, from being perceived in the semiotic relational system as similar to the Statue of Liberty despite no authorial intent, the Goddess of Democracy statue found itself in the same situation of the Statue of Liberty with the case of the Umbrella Man, being perceived as similar to Milk’s work despite no authorial intent.
Further readings
Bradsher, Keith. “New Image Of The Hong Kong Protests: ‘Umbrella Man’”. The New York Times, 2014, https://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com /2014/10/05/new-symbol-of-hong-kong-protests-umbrella-man/. Accessed 25 Oct 2020.
Holland, Oscar. “How Tiananmen Square’s ‘Goddess Of Democracy’ Became A Symbol Of Defiance”. CNN, 2019, https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/tiananmen-square-goddess-of-democracy/index.html.
Introduction to Visual Culture - FLM 100 