Socialist Art From China, Remade in Michigan

On February 17, the Beijing-based artist Wang Qingsong assembled more than 50 people in Highland Park, Michigan, on the site of a candy factory that was destroyed by a fire in 2012. The artist is known for his large-format photographs that often echo canonical works of Chinese art, using actors posed against sprawling contemporary backdrops. In Highland Park, he was re-creating an enormous charcoal sketch titled “The Bloody Clothes,” displayed in the National Museum of China and considered a major early socialist-period artwork.

Completed in 1959 by a realist painter named Wang Shikuo (no relation to Wang Qingsong), “The Bloody Clothes” commemorates the land-reform campaigns that swept across China after the Communist Party came to power, repealing the rights of landowners and giving their land to peasants. In the sketch, the central figure accuses her former landlord of exploitation, waving a blood-stained shirt as proof while members of the public look on. Although land reform in China is remembered today for the violent ends that befell many landlords, at the time it was seen as redistributive social justice, and Wang Shikuo portrayed it with theatrical gravity and a cinematic scope.