Century Mountain
The Century Mountain Project is an East/West collaboration of art between the Chinese poet and calligrapher Huang Xiang and American artist William Rock.
Their subjects include Mozart, Lincoln, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Rimbaud, Phillis Wheatley, Li Bai, Murasaki Shikibu, Malcolm X, Isadora Duncan, and Edgar Allan Poe.
Seeing the collaborative paintings of Huang Xiang and William Rock is like having a personal encounter with the subject depicted.
The fire spreading through his neighborhood reached the very wall of the family compound; newborn Huang and his mother, still connected by the umbilical cord, had to be carried to safety to a nearby temple.
Huang's father was in charge of supply for the army group that fought the GMD's last great campaign in Shenyang Province of Manchuria in 1948.
The family learned late in 1951 that earlier that year Huang's father had been summarily shot in a prison camp near Beijing.
The denial of public education left Huang Xiang feeling severely hurt, for he strongly desired to continue his schooling.
The quandary was soon alleviated, however, when he discovered in a concealed loft in his grandparents, home a treasure trove of college books that his father had put away years earlier.
moreover there were the extensive notes made by his father in a notebook, including quotations from Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, as well as Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Goethe, Marx, Freud and others.
While working at a Metals Factory at the age of seventeen in 1958, Huang Xiang had several of his poems accepted for publication.
Conformity is not one of his attributes, however, he soon became dissatisfied with the tight limitations on style and subject matter that prevailed, and determined to eschew them completely in the future.
With roving eyes always open, Huang Xiang soon spied and befriended a half-Tibetan girl who spoke educated Mandarin.
To Huang's great humiliation, the arresting officer charged him in front of other workers "with being an active counterrevolutionary who hated the Communist party and intended to escape across the border."
The Party promptly expelled him from The Writers Association, and proposed an absolute ban on publishing his writing for forty years.
In 1967, Huang Xiang was on the verge of entering a new phase of his life, beginning to write the serious poems that survive and that mark him as a man of ability, perception and courage.
Yingzi became ill and Huang requested permission at the work camp where he was assigned to visit his nine-month-old son in the hospital.
When he protested he received criticism and denunciation; when he refused to bow his head, they hung a heavy weight from his neck from a wire that drew blood.
The next day Huang carried his son's lifeless body up a hill, and after sitting with him for some hours in a state of deep grief, buried him on a sunny slope above the city.
China's movement for democracy has been carried forward in thousands of poems and one poet has emerged supreme: Huang Xiang of the Enlightenment Society.
When Huang and his companions had come together some years before in their poor, remote home province of Guizhou "to study social problems, under the merciless oppression and cultural despotism of Lin Biao and the Gang of Four," they had asked themselves why China, with its long history of civilization, progressed so slowly, when Yugoslavia, also a "socialist" state, had developed quickly.
The police searched for his manuscripts, but he had hidden them in candles by wrapping them in plastic bags, then rolling around them wicks, then finally molding wax around them.
On 11 October 1978 they pasted them up on the blank walls of an alleyway that runs beside the offices of the People's Daily, in the busy shopping center of the capital.
Six weeks later, when free speech was blossoming on the Democracy Wall, Huang wrote the poems out again as a new ninety-four-panel poster of even larger characters.
