This entry was posted
on Monday, December 30th, 2002 at 8:11 pm.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
You know something, it’s a shame that Channel 5 (sorry, “five”) are moving up market a bit. I’m fairly sure that at one point in their history they could have been persuaded to televise that.
Come to think of it, perhaps it’s not too late. If they’ll do a “celebrity enema” reality TV show, is “Widdicaged” really beyond them…?
You do know the details? This is quite an old story that’s been on rotten.com and The Register (in fact I tipped off The Register when they cited a daft Independent story about the photos being investigated by UK no-brainer child abuse experts who hadn’t even done a web search). Zhu Yu is an artist who, like a number of others, uses corpse material for his installations. Personally I think this is really pukey, but given that the said display involves photo-stills, I’m not convinced that he is genuinely a cannibal. His work has been openly featured on chinese-art.com for a couple of years, and I think he would have been jumped on long since by the Chinese authorities if he were doing anything against their local jurisdiction. The issue seems to be that (like Von Hagens and BodyWorlds) he’s doing something against British practice regarding sourcing and use of cadaver material. The rest, I’m sure, is publicity.
I wasn’t aware of the earlier coverage of the story. It looks as if the old Usenet joke works on the web too: the quickest way to get the right answer is to post the wrong one and wait for someone to correct you. :-)
It certainly sounds like a case of Channel 4 working overtime to generate publicity for their China Season. Which is a pity, since it looks to be pretty worthwhile anyway.
It’s a fairly messy saga. The Independent reported as suspected ritual satanic abuse an image that quickly tracked down (see Rotten.com and The Register) to this Zhu Yu rather than anything illicit. The site http://www.chinese-art.com (a high-quality site about contemporary Chinese art exhibitions) has a feature, but it’s currently down … bandwidth probably swamped. Briefly, he’s part of a group whose art uses cadavers for frozen tableaux, as well as other weirdness such as implant surgery performance art and the usual Damien Hirst line in inflated dead horses and such like. However, the story has since been complicated by association with long-standing unverified tales of wholesale baby-eating in China. There’s a current Straight Dope thread on the subject.
I did a bit of googling for information on the subject myself before posting my last comment on this post. It looks very much as if the whole subject is tied in with a persistent blood libel against the Chinese. I noticed that in the Straight Dope thread you linked to somebody posted a link to a Snopes article which points out that this story keeps popping up every few years, and offers some reasoned explanations for the popularity of the notion. You’d think I’d know by now to check Snopes before believing this sort of thing.
Incidentally, I didn’t get to see the documentary. Did it shed any new light on the topic? I have to admit that I was dividing my attention between working at my PC and watching the pretty explosions in the last half hour of Independence Day. If they ever make a sequel to Independence Day their first task should be to explain how exactly civilisation on Earth survived given that a) several major cities had a 15-mile spaceship fall on them, and b) the destruction of a mothership that size should have had pretty much the same effect on Earth as the Ewok Holocaust did on Endor.
I did see the earlier programme on Mao’s Children, which turned out pretty much exactly as I’d expected: people who are doing very nicely thank you claiming that “politics isn’t important” and they’re as free as they could wish to be, or suddenly going very vague when asked about topics like internet censorship, whilst the government does its’ best to ensure that foreign journalists don’t see the prostitutes or the political prisoners or the poor bastards working in factories without the benefit of union representation. Mind you, I did note that the fashion designer who was interviewed near the start of the programme was apparently choosing her words carefully: if the subtitles were an accurate translation, she said something to the effect that she’d never been stopped from doing anything she wanted “in her business.” Was this her way of pointing out that her life outside the business was another matter?
I saw all but the beginning (missed because I was also watching Independence Day). To cut a long story short, the artists featured seemed to have the same concerns as artists anywhere (politics, mortality, gender, some shock value) but were working from a cultural position that’s … well … less squeamish than the West about animals and body parts. I’ve posted a fuller account here.
Thanks for the link to your Straight Dope posting.
It sounds very much as if on the one hand we’ve got an artist from a culture where the taboos about cadaver material are, as you noted, significantly different to those in the west. As the Snopes article pointed out, with reference to rumours of fried fetus being on the menu:
Our knowledge of the existence of cultural differences (even if we don’t know exactly what those differences are) helps prepare the soil for wild rumors like this one to sprout in, because this tidbit of “information” seems to fit so well with what we think we know about a deeply mistrusted foreign culture. One could not successfully kite the same tale about Canada, for instance, because folks would immediately reject it as wholly false. But set it in China, and it begins to sound if not plausible, at least possible. The Chinese treat bodies of executed wrongdoers as piles of recyclable parts lying there for the taking; why wouldn’t they view aborted fetuses as something that could be added to a lunch menu?
Throw in a TV channel with a documentary to promote (not to mention a desire to regain a reputation for being ‘edgy’ and ‘out there’) and a bunch of reactionary tabloid newspapers and you have all the ingredients for a good three-day wonder in the media.
And, of course, the Chinese are well-known for eating strange stuff by our standards. A long time back I remember reading - can’t remember where - a believable analysis of why. It came down to climate, population and highly variable food supply; you couldn’t afford the luxury of not eating, say, gristle, fat or duck’s feet, and you needed to keep dried food for lean times. The economy argument explained other stuff, such as the invention of the wok and stir-frying (very fuel-efficient if there’s not much to burn) and the pig toilet (extreme recycling).
John, have you considered the notion of cutting off posting comments after, say, three months? Just a thought. Although I admit there’s considerable comedy effect to leaving them open.
Yes, I’ve considered it. But on a low-profile site like this the odd comment on an old post isn’t any great burden. As a general rule I’d rather leave comments open and give people who find my entries via search engines the chance to contribute. (The one exception to that rule is, of course, the infamous Oprah post.) If the level of comment spam rose to the point where I was having to spend too much time deleting comments on old posts then I’d reconsider, but (touch wood) for now MT-Blacklist has done a pretty good job of stemming the tide. (It helps to be a pretty low-profile, low-volume weblog. I completely understand why the authors of busierweblogs than mine have adopted a different policy.)
December 31st, 2002 at 11:40 am
My feeling is that they should lock widdecombe in a cage and force-feed her babies until she stops complaining. But that could be a niche opinion…
December 31st, 2002 at 6:29 pm
You know something, it’s a shame that Channel 5 (sorry, “five”) are moving up market a bit. I’m fairly sure that at one point in their history they could have been persuaded to televise that.
Come to think of it, perhaps it’s not too late. If they’ll do a “celebrity enema” reality TV show, is “Widdicaged” really beyond them…?
January 1st, 2003 at 5:30 am
You do know the details? This is quite an old story that’s been on rotten.com and The Register (in fact I tipped off The Register when they cited a daft Independent story about the photos being investigated by UK no-brainer child abuse experts who hadn’t even done a web search). Zhu Yu is an artist who, like a number of others, uses corpse material for his installations. Personally I think this is really pukey, but given that the said display involves photo-stills, I’m not convinced that he is genuinely a cannibal. His work has been openly featured on chinese-art.com for a couple of years, and I think he would have been jumped on long since by the Chinese authorities if he were doing anything against their local jurisdiction. The issue seems to be that (like Von Hagens and BodyWorlds) he’s doing something against British practice regarding sourcing and use of cadaver material. The rest, I’m sure, is publicity.
January 1st, 2003 at 4:50 pm
I wasn’t aware of the earlier coverage of the story. It looks as if the old Usenet joke works on the web too: the quickest way to get the right answer is to post the wrong one and wait for someone to correct you. :-)
It certainly sounds like a case of Channel 4 working overtime to generate publicity for their China Season. Which is a pity, since it looks to be pretty worthwhile anyway.
January 2nd, 2003 at 12:16 am
It’s a fairly messy saga. The Independent reported as suspected ritual satanic abuse an image that quickly tracked down (see Rotten.com and The Register) to this Zhu Yu rather than anything illicit. The site http://www.chinese-art.com (a high-quality site about contemporary Chinese art exhibitions) has a feature, but it’s currently down … bandwidth probably swamped. Briefly, he’s part of a group whose art uses cadavers for frozen tableaux, as well as other weirdness such as implant surgery performance art and the usual Damien Hirst line in inflated dead horses and such like. However, the story has since been complicated by association with long-standing unverified tales of wholesale baby-eating in China. There’s a current Straight Dope thread on the subject.
January 3rd, 2003 at 2:43 am
I did a bit of googling for information on the subject myself before posting my last comment on this post. It looks very much as if the whole subject is tied in with a persistent blood libel against the Chinese. I noticed that in the Straight Dope thread you linked to somebody posted a link to a Snopes article which points out that this story keeps popping up every few years, and offers some reasoned explanations for the popularity of the notion. You’d think I’d know by now to check Snopes before believing this sort of thing.
Incidentally, I didn’t get to see the documentary. Did it shed any new light on the topic? I have to admit that I was dividing my attention between working at my PC and watching the pretty explosions in the last half hour of Independence Day. If they ever make a sequel to Independence Day their first task should be to explain how exactly civilisation on Earth survived given that a) several major cities had a 15-mile spaceship fall on them, and b) the destruction of a mothership that size should have had pretty much the same effect on Earth as the Ewok Holocaust did on Endor.
I did see the earlier programme on Mao’s Children, which turned out pretty much exactly as I’d expected: people who are doing very nicely thank you claiming that “politics isn’t important” and they’re as free as they could wish to be, or suddenly going very vague when asked about topics like internet censorship, whilst the government does its’ best to ensure that foreign journalists don’t see the prostitutes or the political prisoners or the poor bastards working in factories without the benefit of union representation. Mind you, I did note that the fashion designer who was interviewed near the start of the programme was apparently choosing her words carefully: if the subtitles were an accurate translation, she said something to the effect that she’d never been stopped from doing anything she wanted “in her business.” Was this her way of pointing out that her life outside the business was another matter?
January 3rd, 2003 at 11:48 am
I saw all but the beginning (missed because I was also watching Independence Day). To cut a long story short, the artists featured seemed to have the same concerns as artists anywhere (politics, mortality, gender, some shock value) but were working from a cultural position that’s … well … less squeamish than the West about animals and body parts. I’ve posted a fuller account here.
January 4th, 2003 at 2:30 pm
Thanks for the link to your Straight Dope posting.
It sounds very much as if on the one hand we’ve got an artist from a culture where the taboos about cadaver material are, as you noted, significantly different to those in the west. As the Snopes article pointed out, with reference to rumours of fried fetus being on the menu:
Throw in a TV channel with a documentary to promote (not to mention a desire to regain a reputation for being ‘edgy’ and ‘out there’) and a bunch of reactionary tabloid newspapers and you have all the ingredients for a good three-day wonder in the media.
January 5th, 2003 at 8:16 pm
And, of course, the Chinese are well-known for eating strange stuff by our standards. A long time back I remember reading - can’t remember where - a believable analysis of why. It came down to climate, population and highly variable food supply; you couldn’t afford the luxury of not eating, say, gristle, fat or duck’s feet, and you needed to keep dried food for lean times. The economy argument explained other stuff, such as the invention of the wok and stir-frying (very fuel-efficient if there’s not much to burn) and the pig toilet (extreme recycling).
January 5th, 2003 at 9:13 pm
Yes, I’ve heard the theory about the wok and stir-fry before. Sounds plausible enough to me.
It makes you wonder what odd beliefs East Asians have about our eating habits…
February 23rd, 2003 at 3:15 am
YOU KNOW WHAT BABIES ARE YUMMY AND I WROTE A BOOK ABOUT EATING THEM DONT MATTER AS LONG AS ITS YUMMY!
May 6th, 2004 at 12:03 am
EATING BABIES IS TOTALY WRONG!A POOR LITTLE BABY WHAT SO EVER DID NOTHING WRONG!ALL PEOPLE SHOULD BURN IN HELL FOR THIS!
May 6th, 2004 at 1:45 pm
I AM TOTALLY FAVORING EATING BABIES! THEY ARE YUMMY WITH BARBECUE SAUCE, OR MAYBE SOME PEANUTS! LET IS ALL NOW USE MORE CAPITAL LETTERS!
May 6th, 2004 at 1:49 pm
John, have you considered the notion of cutting off posting comments after, say, three months? Just a thought. Although I admit there’s considerable comedy effect to leaving them open.
May 6th, 2004 at 11:43 pm
YES, I’VE CONSIDERED …
HANG ON …
Yes, I’ve considered it. But on a low-profile site like this the odd comment on an old post isn’t any great burden. As a general rule I’d rather leave comments open and give people who find my entries via search engines the chance to contribute. (The one exception to that rule is, of course, the infamous Oprah post.) If the level of comment spam rose to the point where I was having to spend too much time deleting comments on old posts then I’d reconsider, but (touch wood) for now MT-Blacklist has done a pretty good job of stemming the tide. (It helps to be a pretty low-profile, low-volume weblog. I completely understand why the authors of busier weblogs than mine have adopted a different policy.)
June 10th, 2004 at 12:36 am
EAT BABIES 4EVA!