Remaking Tank Man,in China

Cartooning Around

The efforts of recent repurposers of Tank Man to break the Chinese internet, or at least break into it from time to time, give some first indications of this point. One such example is the work of Chinese political cartoonist Badiucao, who has remade Tank Man several times in recent years. Born in Shanghai and now based in Australia, Badiucao’s starkly lined cartoons in black and red – he calls contemporary China a ‘giant meat grinder’, a ‘vortex of blood and iron’ (China Digital Times, 2016: 6) – initially found small but dedicated audiences on the Chinese microblogging platform Weibo until clampdowns pushed him onto Twitter, which is only available within China via VPN. Two of Badiucao’s repurposings of Tank Man are immediately telling, though for different reasons: ‘Daily Patrol’ (Richang xunluo) and ‘A Piece of Red Cloth’ (Yi kuai hongbu) (Figures 3 and 4). In ‘Daily Patrol’, Badiucao shows a young Uyghur girl confronting the tanks, in what appears to be a straightforward gesture of support for Xinjiang separatism. Yet the red heart-shaped balloon she kites aloft also alludes to Banksy’s famous mural, ‘Girl with the Red Balloon’, which was stenciled on select street locations in London c.2002. Banksy, we might recall, also repurposed ‘Girl Fleeing Napalm’ – flanking the naked child between Ronald McDonald on one side and Mickey Mouse on the other – and this concentrated intertextuality serves to reiterate the point that repurposings of iconic images now relate as much to each other as they do to their original source. The cartoon also manages to invert the global-local relation which has been such a dogged feature of Tank Man’s ascendancy into iconicity, and in which his dissident agency is fused with various Western/global commodity signifiers from fast food to internet giants in order to serve free market ideology. Here, by contrast, the cartoon harnesses Banksy to take aim at a redolently Chinese political context.

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Figure 3

Badiucao: ‘Daily Patrol’, 2014.

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Figure 4

Badiucao: ‘A Piece of Red Cloth’, 2014.

Provocative in a different way is ‘A Piece of Red Cloth’, in which the body of the tank is draped with crimson fabric: blood and iron again, as well, of course, as the familiar red of the Chinese Communist Party and its cover-up, literally rendered, of the Tian’anmen protests in the years since. This intimation is, once again, intertextual, since the cartoon’s title recalls the famous song by Chinese rock singer Cui Jian, ‘A Piece of Red Cloth’, which became something of a protest anthem during the 1989 demonstrations in the Square. As Nimrod Baranovitch notes (2003: 238), the song alludes to how

Chinese society was blindfolded by the Communist Party during the revolutionary period … [It] describes a violent experience of someone who is not only blindfolded, but whose hands are clasped and whose mouth is blocked by someone else so he cannot see, speak, drink, escape, or even cry. The speaker in the song turns into a subjugated creature …

When he sang the song on stage, Cui Jian would typically blindfold himself with a red cloth, turning his performance into a staging of the complicity that was also necessary for that subjugation. At the same time, the draping of the tank in a large swathe of red also recalls Cui Jian’s later album Balls under the Red Flag ( Hongqi xia de dan ), whose cover shows an embryo blindfolded with a red cloth again, but is more upbeat in tone. The threading of Tank Man into this rich seam of intertextuality, in which motifs of voluntary and involuntary blinkering coalesce, gives the cartoon a layered set of significations for those with memories of 1989; even more than ‘Daily Patrol’, it uses allusion to re-root the icon – which we see again with this cartoon Badiucao drew during the Hong Kong umbrella movement of 2014 (Figure 5).

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Figure 5

Badiucao: ‘Go Hong Kong’, 2014.

Yet even for those without that personal databank, the cartoon is visually emphatic. Above all, its red cloth suggests the futility of censoring the iconography of Tank Man, even in a China from which the traces of that photograph have officially been wiped clean: by ‘concealing’ the tank in a cloak of political redness, which leaves the outlines of the combat vehicle comically obvious, Badiucao shows just how perversely memorable the past remains, and that the threat it poses may even be heightened by the action of cloaking. This point emerged strikingly during a performance of Cirque du Soleil at a Beijing theatre in 2013, when the image of Tank Man was flashed up as part of a montage for four seconds, after having somehow eluded the pre-screening eyes of the Chinese Ministry of Culture. Media outlets outside China noted that the audience gasped in shock (Wong, 2013); but presumably they gasped in recognition, too. Something rather similar occurred in 2009 when American artist and designer Michael Mandiberg, by way of curious experiment, contacted several copyist artists in Dafen Painting Village in Shenzhen and asked them to produce replicas of the Tank Man photograph. Mandiberg displayed the varied results on his blog, titling ‘each image with a snippet of dialogue from the negotiations for each painting’ (Mandiberg, 2009).

While some went ahead and fulfilled the commission per spec, others fudged, rejected, or simply ignored it. One version paints the tanks but omits the man; the painter tells Mandiberg: ‘You can add the person to painting when you get it’. Another queries: ‘the man … will be painted or not?’. A third paints the man, but inclines his head and upper body slightly, so that he appears to be bowing to the tanks. The most telling comment comes from the final communication Mandiberg posts. This last artist turns down the commission, stating that painting such images is ‘illegal’ in China. ‘When I was in high school in 1989, I once devote my passion to that event’, the email continues, but ‘now most Chinese people forgot the history while I [do] not’ (Mandiberg, 2009). Yet mass amnesia, with its suggestion of involuntary mnemonic fail, is an imperfect take on the problem. As Badiucao put it in an email interview with me (Badiucao, personal communication, 2016):

The group who lived through the Tian’anmen killings, particularly those who participated in the events, is now middle-aged and forms the core stratum of contemporary society, the key constituents of the middle-class. They know this history all too well. What’s more, the image of Tank Man was broadcast on news networks at the time as a way of displaying the humanity of party bosses and the army, who refrained from crushing Tank Man to a bloody pulp (niancheng roubing). So although the authorities now tightly control information about June 4th and Tank Man, this is nothing more than the emperor’s new clothes: middle-aged people all have a tacit knowledge of what happened; it’s a secret closely kept by both sides.

In short, for a large chunk of China’s population – those born before the mid-1970s or so – June 4th is what Michael Taussig calls (1999: 5) a ‘public secret’, that which is ‘generally known, but cannot be articulated’, and whose faux clandestine character all conspire to maintain. The public secret relies on an ‘active not-knowing’ or ‘knowing what not to know’ (Taussig, 1999: 6–7); or, as Bourdieu puts it (2000 [1997]: 192), skewering the complicity even more sharply, it is all about ‘the rule of the game which is to act as if one did not know the rule’. For those born later, by contrast, June 4th is passive non-knowledge, which helps to explain the split amongst the Dafen copyists, between those who readily copied the image in its entirety and those who doctored or declined it altogether. ³ Contemporary Chinese society has been fascinated for the last few years by the idea of the so-called ‘hidden rules’ (qian guize) – from how to bribe an official to how to get ahead in the entertainment industry – which determine status, power, and advantage in the PRC; yet the carefully maintained non-legacy of the Tian’anmen protests shows that its partner term, the public secret, is also a crucial structuring force in China’s socio-political relations today. On one level, then, one might argue that by repeatedly repurposing an image that everyone who saw it back then has ‘agreed’ to forget, Badiucao’s cartoons are intent on confronting this disavowal in all its collusiveness, motivated by the desire to disrobe it. The circulation history of his cartoons, and those of his partners in political satire, seems, ostensibly at least, to corroborate this claim.

As already indicated, Badiucao is essentially expatriated from China, as is Rebel Pepper (real name: Wang Liming), another subversive cartoonist who has also repurposed Tank Man several times in his work and who moved under duress to Japan in 2014, and Crazy Crab, who now lives in Finland. A few short years ago, all three of these cartoonists still lived, and drew, in China. Along with other notable satirists such as Kuang Biao, they took advantage of the launch of the microblogging platform Weibo to resuscitate the tradition of mordant political art in China, and all worked powerfully with the Tank Man image, reversioning and re-rooting it for Chinese netizens. As media commentator David Bandurski noted as recently as 2012 (quoted in Langfitt, 2012), the advent of the microblog ‘dramatically changed the environment for cartoonists. They now have a really good platform to find an audience’. During the brief window between Weibo’s launch and the heavy-handed crackdown which prompted Badiucao, Rebel Pepper, and Crazy Crab to evacuate the country, all four cartoonists built up core followings on that site and/or similar platforms. The novelty of Weibo – at this point still a relatively unknown quantity for the state and thus not yet hyper-regulated – combined with the particular medial properties of the political cartoon to create an extended moment for these artists. As Crazy Crab has observed in an interview (Ploum, 2013):

Cartoons are the nightmares of the censorship system because unlike words, the check can’t search through drawings. Therefore, it’s more difficult to trace drawn satire. A sharp political cartoon can spread widely before the internet police figures out its real meaning.

Getting Ghostly

As the internet police steadily got to grips with Weibo, though, China’s political cartoonists increasingly found themselves resorting to a practice known as ‘reincarnating’ (zhuanshi) to get their work into the ether. Zhuanshi is originally a Buddhist term meaning the ‘transmigration of souls’, but in Chinese internet lingo it refers to the creation of a new social media account after an earlier one has been shut down by the provider, usually because the user has breached the bounds of political acceptability. Badiucao has reincarnated 30 times, sufficient frustration for him to state that ‘the Chinese space for political cartoonists in the mainland has already closed’ (China Digital Times, 2016: 7); Kuang Biao has been reborn closer to 50 times and is still in the game. Needless to say, the practice of reincarnation on social media lends itself most readily to the critique of censorship in China, a longstanding red-button issue in the Western media. My interest in zhuanshi, though, derives more from its linguistic origins, and specifically from the potent suggestion of the otherworldly, the shape-shifting, the uncanny even, that emanates from the term. To reincarnate successfully on social media requires the user to reincarnate recognizably, to adopt a new avatar that allows him or her to be identified by fans while remaining, for a short while at least, elusive to the agents of authority: Kuang Biao recently reincarnated as ‘Uncle Biao Fountain Pen Drawings 47’. In other words, just as Tank Man – himself a wraith, as already noted – mutates from photograph to pen-and-ink reversionings of that image, so too do his repurposers morph and migrate in order to slip into the online interstices that can give them a shortlived platform for their work. Remediating Tank Man is, in this sense, a multiply spectral practice; it turns all whom it touches into shadows of themselves.

This spectrality lays its forceful marks on political cartoons of Tank Man. A decisive example of this can be seen in Figure 6, a reworking of Tank Man from 2011 by Crazy Crab. Rather like a cinematographer who films in 360 degrees instead of the 180 decreed by classic Hollywood continuity editing, Crazy Crab ‘crosses the line’ here and provides a disorientating but revelatory inversion of the standard Tank Man framing: at last we see his face. As Badiucao has noted (personal communication, 2016), what Tank Man ‘left the world was a figure seen from behind’ (beiying, literally a ‘back shadow’, ⁴ and an expression with a faint ghostly resonance in Chinese) – and Crazy Crab’s inversion reveals yet another spectral morphing. Tank Man has been reincarnated as Chen Guangcheng, the famous civil rights activist and ‘barefoot lawyer’, who is immediately recognizable to Chinese audiences because of his dark glasses (Chen is blind). ⁵ The text in the bubble reads ‘Dammit! Another case of organizing a mob to disturb traffic’, which on one level refers to the trumped-up charge of ‘damaging property and organizing a mob to disturb traffic’, for which Chen was handed a jail term of four years and three months in 2006. The Chinese term for ‘Dammit’, though, is jiangui, which literally means ‘to see a ghost’, thus lexically reinforcing the spectral connection between the two disappearing – or forcibly disappeared – dissidents.

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Figure 6

Crazy Crab, 2011.

There is once again a spectral feel to the cartoon shown in Figure 7, also by Crazy Crab. Here, he is spoofing a controversial policy of the regional government in Tibet, which in the run-up to Chinese New Year in 2012 distributed over a million portraits of Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao to temples and monasteries all over Tibet, where a strict ban remains in force on the display of portraits of the Dalai Lama (in 2015 the visage of Xi Jinping was added to the roster) (Anonymous, 2015). An aggressive rhetoric of substitution is in play here, in which professed state secularism turns into the usurpation of sacralized space by the icons of Party power, and the attempted ‘exorcism’ of the Dalai Lama – a much-feared ‘ghost’ for the CCP – from his spiritual homes. His spirit resurfaces in the cartoon, which picks up this rhetoric of substitution and runs with it, shape-shifting Tank Man into a Buddhist monk, dwarfed by the goon-like portraits of China’s leaders which loom in the place of the tanks. Less battle of the titans than battle of the icons, the cartoon also mocks the authorities whose overkill of more than a million portraits, materially produced and systematically distributed, is still reduced to an almost embarrassing David vs. Goliath with Tank Man, the wraith who dwells fitfully but evocatively on the digital margins.

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Figure 7

Crazy Crab, 2012.

The cartoon in Figure 8, by Badiucao and entitled ‘The Sacred Vestments of Tank Man’, again places Tank Man’s spectrality at front and center while at the same time seeming to parlay directly with Crazy Crab’s earlier images, in which Tank Man ‘reliveth’ as latterday opponent of party power. As Badiucao put it to me:

The flesh may perish, but clothing and personal effects do not, and these items seem to support the spirit after the body has decayed; thanks to them, the spirit can be preserved and transmit itself to later generations … Tank Man was a hero who dressed in this most ordinary of shirts and trousers; perhaps one day others can put on these ordinary clothes and step bravely onto the street.

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Figure 8

Badiucao: ‘Vestments of Tank Man’, 2013.

Tank Man, as a dissident identity, can shuffle off this mortal coil (suggested by the blood stain on his shirt) yet return in different guises, like the reincarnated revenant he is, to the scene of other stand-offs with the state. All of these cartoons also call oblique attention to the idiosyncrasies of June 4 and Tank Man as public secret in China. As already suggested, state management of this legacy has carved out a generational memory crevasse in contemporary China: those old enough to remember the events stand mutely on one side, while those too young or at that time not yet born stand, almost blithely unaware, on the other. The disjuncture is such that when filmmaker Antony Thomas quizzed a quartet of students at Beijing University, the epicenter of the protests, about Tank Man in preparation for his eponymous documentary in 2005, they responded by asking politely if the image showed a military parade (Gavett, 2012). The cartoons use the figure of the revenant – particularly the ghost of futures past, since Chen Guangcheng et al. postdate Tank Man – to foretell a time when different histories will be written, even as the visual reference to the so-called ‘fourth generation’ of leadership in China (Mao, Deng, Jiang, Hu) acknowledges the successive silences imposed by the scions of the current dynasty.

This abundance of spectrality, so much of it self-reflexive, does not entirely square with the idea that these cartoons simply seek to shout out the secret that dare not speak its name in the hope that this cry will end the phony performance of amnesia. In fact, as Jack Bratich has pointed out (2006: 502), the operations of public secrecy undermine ‘a fundamental assumption among oppositional forces, namely the belief that the revelation of secrets is inherently a progressive force’. On the contrary, a simple process of denuding only plays into the hands of the public secret, which ‘has built-in protection against exposure, because exposure, or at least a certain modality of exposure, is what, in fact, it thrives upon’ (Taussig, 1999: 216). Rather than remind people of an event which they have never actually forgotten, oppositional forces would do better to come up with what Taussig elsewhere calls (1998: 246) ‘a set of tricks, simulations, deceptions, and art or appearance in a continuous movement of counterfeit and feint strangely contiguous with yet set against those weighing on us’; or as Benjamin put it many years before, ‘Truth is not a matter of exposure which destroys the secret, but a revelation that does justice to it’ (1977 [1928]: 31). Although Taussig does not really specify what these moves might be, nor how this revelatory justice might be done, a suggestion comes when he writes that public secrecy first caught his attention in Columbia during the early 1980s, ‘when there were so many situations in which people dared not state the obvious, thus outlining it, so to speak, in the spectral radiance of the unsaid’ (1999: 6).

This statement alludes to the relationship between the public secret and the specter, and as such it resonates interestingly with a question posed by Bratich: ‘What can be learned from the secret, not just about it?’ (2006: 502). If we move beyond the dialectic between concealment and disclosure, and start scrutinizing public secrecy as a force or structure, its ‘strangely contiguous’ similarities with ghostliness swim into focus. Both hover between presence and absence, and just as we know that ghosts are figments of our fancy, but sense their force anyway – hence the spectral turn in the Humanities since the 1990s – so do we know that public secrets exist all too brazenly, but feel compelled to ‘see no evil’. Both, then, are entities which hide in plain sight, whose power impinges forcefully on political life even though it is nominally dismissed. What’s more, both have an enduring, steadfast character: the public secret has nothing much to fear from revelation, and nor does the specter need to quail before the exorcist, for the simple reason that both are necessary for society’s functioning. Just as shared secrets form ‘the basis of our social institutions, the workplace, the market, the family, and the state’ (Taussig, 1999: 3), so do unburiable vestiges from the past return again and again to remind those institutions of the duty they owe, and yet often betray, to the demands of justice. In this sense, the public secret and the specter are hostile doppelgängers, identical in shape and in many of their operations, yet also profoundly antithetical to one another, moving in gestures of feint and counter-feint in their shadowy parallel spaces. It is partly for this reason that cultural practices which wish to aggravate the public secret can productively take on the lineaments of the spectral to do so.

A recent example of a work which not only assumes ghostly shape but also explicitly addresses the relationship between the public secret and the specter is Chen Shaoxiong’s Ink History (Moshui lishi, 2010), a three-minute video which traverses China’s past from the late Qing period until the present day (Chen, 2010). Described by the artist as a combination of ink, animation, and installation, Ink History consists of dozens of terse but fluid drawings based on famous photographs of Chinese history, ‘scavenged’ entirely from the internet, and set in propulsive motion to a soundtrack of political speeches, propaganda songs, and a loudly ticking clock. As such, Ink History is perhaps above all else a work of search engine art, yet one which offers an alternative look to the frozen collage of the Google image search, which delivers up static, silent screenshots of countless multi-medial remakes of one and the same iconic shot. Chen Shaoxiong has a professed ‘distrust of single-image photographs’ (Wang, 2012: 214), even as he is possessed of a strong repurposing drive, and what Ink History presents, therefore, can be seen as the complementary inverse of ‘Syrian boy beach’: multiple photographic icons reversioned by the same artist, in a single medium, and made highly audible and judderingly kinetic (staggered zooms in and out are a particular feature). Approaching the web-driven photographic icon against the grain of Google Images and its algorithmic aesthetic, the video couples the expressivity of ink with the flow of animation to liberate history from the frame even as it relies very openly on a photographically composited vision of the past.

Ink History would be arresting for this reason alone, but it also offers a staging of the public secret as art. The video strings together ink reversionings of, inter alia, Sun Yat-Sen seated with his wife Soong Ching-Ling, warlord and politician Yuan Shikai, writer Lu Xun, the ‘killing contest’ of the Nanjing Massacre, the Long March, Chiang Kai-Shek on the cover of Time magazine, Mao Zedong declaring the founding of the People’s Republic on 1 October 1949, Mao with Stalin, the well-known propaganda poster ‘We Must Liberate Taiwan’, model citizen and cultural icon Lei Feng, the denunciation of counter-revolutionaries during the Cultural Revolution, Richard Nixon shaking hands with Zhou Enlai on his arrival in Beijing in 1972, Mao’s body lying in state in 1976, the trial of the Gang of Four, Deng Xiaoping greeting Margaret Thatcher, the glittering rise of Pudong, Shanghai’s business district, the handover of Hong Kong to the mainland, China’s triumphal space program, the Sichuan earthquake, and the Beijing Olympics. The iconography is overwhelmingly propagandistic, and in many cases overbearingly familiar, particularly for older Chinese people; furthermore, all the images are easily accessible via Baidu, even when the history shown strays into the controversial.

But then, at 2.29 minutes, Tank Man appears (Figure 9). The camera zooms in six times with a staccato thrust over the next two seconds, more times than it performs this move at any other point in the video. The image, which is unmistakably Tank Man at 2.29, becomes by 2.31 noticeably less defined under the zooming, even as this motion jolts the image out of calcified inertness. The camera tries to pin him down by peering closer, but the shapes loosen and the fluidity of the ink strokes asserts itself. The jerkiness of the camera movement, which also jumps slightly back and forth over the space of the image, emphasizes the sense that, for all his iconicity, Tank Man remains elusive, outlined in a ‘spectral radiance’ (Figure 10). All the sketches in Ink History feel ghostly. This is the effect of ink-as-animation: the flickering motion as the images segue at speed into each other, the centrality of chiaroscuro and shadowing to the sketching process, the sheer repetitiousness of the repurposings with the logic of the afterlife which those repeatings assert. But the sudden appearance of Tank Man amidst all the hyper-sanctioned state imagery has the shock feel of an apparition. How better to aestheticize the notion of a public secret? Like the inverse of stealth or subliminal propaganda, in which key words or images flash up so swiftly that only the unconscious mind registers them, Ink History uses Tank Man to interrupt, for two full seconds, the flow of the excessively familiar with a dip below the radar into the ‘taboo’. ⁶ Yet, at the same time, incorporating Tank Man into this photographic roll-call of China’s modern history also performs, and at the selfsame moment, the very publicness of his secrecy, the extent to which he is totemic too.

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Figures 9 and 10

Screenshots from Chen Shaoxiong, Ink History, 2010.

This point finds different form in Figure 11, which shows the image of Tank Man which Badiucao had tattooed on his upper arm to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Tian’anmen killings. ‘I wanted to use my body to record the memory of Tank Man’, he says. Yet just as significant is the fact that the tattoo is based on Badiucao’s own ink wash re-rendering of the Tank Man photograph. This shows not just the pertinence of ink again, but more broadly that the karmic vehicle which transports Tank Man’s spirit in and out of visibility, even human flesh itself, is the remake. Indeed, what choreographs the pas de deux between spectrality and the public secret which steps its way across these different image-works is the process of photographic repurposing itself, an aesthetic act which shares telling structural similarities with both. A reversioned historical photograph is, almost unavoidably, a spectral object, an admixture of ghostly content, form, and function, all powerfully conjoined. It might seem a needless reminder, but photographs of the dead or disappeared always already – and even in these jaded days – possess a certain ghostly power; and so a repurposed photograph can, without great effort, invoke this abiding and ever-renewing relationship between camera technology and the ghostly: from stealing souls to Barthes’ memento mori. In terms of form, these recent remakes of Tank Man – image-works which are not photography per se even though they are spawned directly from it – summon up the ghost as a figure who dwells in the interstices: between spaces, between mediums. In one sense, this is Derrida’s much-used idea of hauntology (1994: 10) as the bane of ontological surety, since reversioning performs the impermeability of medial states. More importantly, though, these works evoke the link between intermediality and the spirit medium, since the repurposed photograph is always possessed by its original, whose ‘soul’ it channels: the remake as dead ringer. Lastly, there is the affinity of the repurposed photograph with the function of haunting. The ghost, as Avery Gordon has noted, is

a symptom of what is missing. It gives notice not only to itself but also to what it represents. What it represents is usually a loss, sometimes of life, sometimes of a path not taken. (1997: 63–4)

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Figure 11

Badiucao’s Tank Man tattoo, 2014.

The repurposed photographs I look at here use their new incarnations to gesture repetitively back to ‘what is missing’ and the ‘path not taken’, through the devices of allusion (the red blindfold reminder for Hong Kong in 2014) and substitution (Chen Guangcheng and the Buddhist monk).

This persistently interstitial character of the repurposed photograph also aligns it with the public secret. As noted earlier, the latter is a thing that hovers: between the visible and the occluded, the known and the unsayable, marked out by the open oxymoron in its name as an entity which derives capital from being neither one thing nor the other. Indeed, to refine the point made earlier (that cultural forms can usefully deploy the imagery and language of spectrality to take on the public secret in ways that do not short-circuit back to mere exposure), the particular cultural form that is the repurposed historic photograph stakes its claim here as an aesthetic practice especially well tooled, predestined almost, for the task of revelatory justice. Seen structurally, photographic repurposing cleaves just closely enough (though not too much so) in its operations to the public secret itself to permit a more provocative kind of illumination. Taking the friction that already exists between presence and absence in photography proper and expanding it into a broader ambivalence over medial form, ownership of the ‘image narrative’, the frame and what lies beyond it, the repurposed historic photograph mimics at a near remove the core constitutive tensions over information and who controls it which shape public secrecy. Mirroring the public secret as ploy, photographic repurposings – in art, in cartoons, in any other aesthetic medium – articulate in visual language not merely the thing we all know anyway, but the process whereby it goes about costuming itself in garb that we all see through (the tank draped in red cloth): not the public secret per se, but how it works.

Dead Funny

But where does this leave what is arguably the most famous reiteration of Tank Man to break the Chinese internet in recent years: the image shown in Figure 12? Created in 2013 by designer Miller Yu in Hong Kong, from where it went viral in China for a short while until the censors banned all searches for ‘big yellow duck’, this photoshopped Tank Man seems, if anything, deliberately anti-spectral even as it mocks the public secret. Indeed, if ghost had an antonym, it might well be rubber duck: the unheimlich versus the über-homely. The meme was inspired by a 54-foot tall inflatable sculpture of a rubber duck, designed by the Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman, which floated in Hong Kong’s Victoria harbour during 2013. Hofman created the sculpture, and others like it, ‘to amplify the healing power of the classic bath buddy’ (Berthelsen, 2013), and its cheery, primary-colour innocence caused a minor mania in Hong Kong. This backdrop gives the meme its political charge, as the tense stand-off near the Square is soothed into reconciliation, courtesy of an intervention from Hong Kong. Discussions of the duck patrol, whether academic or in the media, have focused on this plastic re-tooling of the image as a tactic for dodging the censors: ducking the firewall, to make the obvious pun. In a context where search terms as apparently innocuous as ‘today’ are blocked on sensitive anniversaries, it is only by taking on the guise of something quintessentially, definitionally bathetic – a plastic yellow duck – that the image of man-versus-tank can do the virtual rounds, for a while at least. In other words, the price of being seen is the possibility of provoking a more meaningful kind of encounter with the events at Tian’anmen in 1989. Yet this censorship argument feels incomplete, on its own, and not just because toys, comics, and cartoon characters recur everywhere in memes or mutations which base themselves on iconic photographs, as an online search for, say, ‘Flags at Iwo Jima’ quickly reveals. For some, no doubt, the shibboleth status of these master-images is a kind of aggravation, a gift to the saboteur, whereas for others there may be a desire to democratize or even tame such photographs using the signifiers of childhood. And, of course, there is the obvious argument about the monetizing of memory. But what if the ducks just make us laugh? If so, how is humor related to the public secret, to spectrality, to the remake?

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Figure 12

Duck Patrol, 2013.

In a way, this question has been hovering at the edges of my discussion for several pages now, and before any mention of the duck patrol. Humor is a core currency of the political cartoon, obviously animating several of the drawings described here. In a literal sense, this laughter is about poking fun at power-holders and their censoring excesses, a kind of satirical shake-down which is important in its own right; yet it does not capture the full picture, which, once again, has a structural dimension. In this more operational sense, humor can be seen as the final component of an aesthetic practice that seeks to square up to public secrecy, and a good part of the reason why it can do this is because comedy shares odd and little-discussed space with both the spectral and the secret that hides in plain sight. All three – humor, spectrality, public secrecy – are modes which often dwell in liminal spaces and gain their power from so doing, and all three, thanks to that, can find fitting aesthetic representation in works that repurpose historic photographs. The logic of the reversioned photograph is, after all, that of the double who is almost the same: an object repurposed is one mutated in such a way that we can recognize both its origin and its new incarnation – and as Freud famously noted nearly a century ago, doppelgängers such as these are uncanny; their creepiness emerges from the cracks.

Yet what Freud did not choose to acknowledge, even though Shakespeare showed it in play after play, is that doubles can also be funny, which no doubt explains why one of the meanings of the term ‘canny’ is sly humor. ⁷ Doubles (and double entendres) amuse because they stake out fecund ground for miscommunication, dissembling, and double-cross – all of it, though, transparently obvious to the audience, which gestures clearly towards the relationship between humor and public secrecy. Grave humor, the darkly comic: ultimately, these companions in doubleness and oxymoron do justice to the public secret because they suggest that the joke is sinister and it is also on us – the people – for seeing that the emperor is naked and praising his outfit nonetheless. Or as Crazy Crab put it in a recent interview (Ploum, 2013): ‘the political cartoon is a “laugh bullet” that can penetrate through lies and fear … When people laugh, they will think too, in a new perspective.’

A still more pertinent parallel, perhaps, is that humor is often coded, encrypted even, a term whose etymology gestures powerfully not just to the keeping of secrets (encryption as the creation of a cipher text that requires a key), but also, and further back, to spectrality (the crypt as a concealed and subterranean burial place). Thus to revisit, and flesh out, the point made a moment ago about censorship, when the duck patrol slips beneath the radar it can do so because humor does not simply entertain, but can also ‘transmit taboo information’ (Attardo, 1994: 330). It is, at times, a tool of secrecy, which uses its doubleness – this time manifested in the gap between the ‘raw’ forbidden information and its encrypted form – to evade detection and bolster a sense of belonging within the in-group. This is the argument made by Flamson and Bryant, who argue that a little-observed aspect of humor is its role as a means of ‘signaling compatibility within local groups by relying on the detection of “encrypted” information’. Cryptography in humor, they suggest, relies on ‘informational complexity to ensure both the secrecy and the authenticity of a message’ (2013: 50–2). Or to paraphrase for the case in hand, the duck patrol amuses not just because of its subversive absurdity, but because the ‘in-group’ – those who see it, those who laugh – know that the meme is using secrecy to play the public secret at its own game. ⁸

If so, Tank Man and his repurposings may be becoming a joke too far for the authorities in China. Like all doppelgängers, it is precisely because of their fugitive character that these images retain their power to provoke both fear and laughter: no-one audibly gasps in shock at a four-second glimpse of Tank Man outside China, after all; why would they, when that image has been used to market not just the free world but Chick-Fil-A chicken sandwiches too (Hariman and Lucaites, 2007: 241)? In China, though, Tank Man remains a spectral talisman, presenting an object lesson of the truism that censorship merely serves to sacralize the objects which it bans – and can duly become a laughing stock itself because of it, as the duck patrol shows rather too tartly. One may suppose that the authorities get this point all too well, and they have the choice of two possible responses: to lift the taboo and let the image run free, and headlong into banality; or to attempt an exorcism, a publicly stage-managed casting out of Tank Man’s wayward spirit. That they may be gearing up for the latter is suggested by recent news reports that Visual China Group has purchased the copyright of one of the few original photographs of Tank Man from Bill Gates. As Xiao Qiang, founder of China Digital Times, puts it, we should not be surprised if ‘a Chinese media company’s decisions and actions were aligned with the policies and practices of the Chinese government’ (quoted in McPhate, 2016). Or as Wang Dan, former protestor in the square, argues more bluntly: ‘Once the copyright of that image falls into the hands of the Chinese Communist Party, I fear it will be sealed up for safekeeping’ (Wang, 2016). Just as likely, of course, is that the CCP will exercise any rights it might sooner or later manage to procure over the image to try to ban its use abroad too, thus avenging itself for the endless critiques of Chinese disregard for intellectual property at the same time as turning the exorcism of Tank Man into a global spectacle.

On the one hand, then, Tank Man exemplifies to a ridiculous degree Wendy Chun’s argument that digital media, despite ‘its ever-increasing archive in which no piece of data is lost’, is in practice ‘degenerative, forgetful, eraseable’ (Chun, 2008: 154, 160). But at the same time, the at best sporadic accessibility of Tank Man and his multi-media, quasi-photographic progeny to most netizens in China also runs counter to the logic of the remake and remembrance that I discussed at the beginning of this article. The rules of ongoing, almost metronomic reiteration that govern the half-lives of a cultural artifact such as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – namely, be remade repeatedly or die – do not apply to Tank Man, and it is precisely and only because he is suppressed that he can transcend them. The one-third of China’s population who were born after 1989 may indeed have only the haziest awareness of Tank Man, if they are cognizant of him at all, but he lives on in China as the grit in the clam of the public secret for the very reason that his remakes are more or less unsearchable (and because when the ghost does surface, he typically makes people laugh). We see this process in reverse with the now almost tediously abundant free-market remediations of Tank Man, which have certainly ensured his memorability; but what kind of legacy is this when ‘a Chinese citizen taking a stand in China … becomes the incarnation of something American’ (Hariman and Lucaites, 2007: 237)? In an era of search engine optimization and spamdexing, in which online ubiquity supposedly keeps an item fresh and in mind, Tank Man’s untrackability in China becomes, paradoxically, his special stock. Always ghostly from the moment that he slipped the scene in 1989, Tank Man’s elusiveness has allowed him to become, not a searchable object on Baidu, but something closer to a roving digital quest.

Off the Grid; Or, Tank Man, Where Are You?

Obviously, there is no greater testament to Tank Man’s unforgottenness than the purchase, for an undisclosed sum, of the vast image-bank that contains the copyright to one (and only one!) of his original images. Provoked into trying to exorcise a ghost – the equivalent of exposing a public secret, and every bit as pointless – the authorities appear to be using proxy interests to drive him from the internet, just as lateral pressure seems to have forced the recent closure of the June 4th Museum (Liusi jinianguan) in Hong Kong (the only site on Chinese soil that commemorates the protests). The museum, 800 square feet in size and located on the fifth floor of an office building in the Tsim Sha Tsui shopping district, was set up by the ‘Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Democratic Movements in China’. At the time of writing, the alliance was seeking a new location for the museum, and various news outlets reported the frustration of its members at the political motives behind the closure (Ramzy and Wong, 2016). Yet a visit to the museum’s website (http://64museum.blogspot.co.uk) reveals that those in charge may already know enough about spectrality, subversive humor, and the public secret to find a way to keep remembrance going. Just as relevantly, the website (ironically enough) offers initial signs that Tank Man as a digital quest can be pursued in offline, physical space too.

On a page of the site entitled ‘Directions to the Museum’ is posted a 3-1/2 minute video, which begins with a shot of a young man brandishing a digital camera, subtitled with the words: ‘There is nothing more meaningful than learning and experiencing the truth. Therefore I decided to use a camera to figure the truth out.’ The camera then cuts to a Playmobil figure behind a tiny plastic tripod, in what may or may not be a knowing reference to the toy spoofs of Tank Man that circulated briefly in 2014 (in addition to the ducks, Lego and Angry Birds also had their meme moments). What follows is a short film in which different young people, sometimes in slo-mo, sometimes speeded-up, take various routes to the obscurely-located museum guided by smartphone mapping apps and the instructions posted in the subtitles, to the accompaniment of ‘Flower of Freedom’ (Ziyouhua), a song by Thomas Chow which is sung every year at the June 4th vigil in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park (and which is blocked on Weibo). The would-be visitors wave cheerily at the camera, line up four-abreast to form a human arrow pointing down the street, bump randomly into fellow pilgrims, and check directions at the Seven-Eleven convenience store, generating an atmosphere up until 1.51 minutes which is best described as jaunty – indeed, this section of the film, with its determined, mischievous levity, turns the journey to the museum into precisely that: a jaunt. At 1.51, though, the camera cuts to the interior of the building, and a spectral mood takes over, as a point-of-view shot ushers the viewer into the darkened, tunneled, and shadowy spaces of the museum itself. Inside, black-and-white photographs and their captions form a ghostly wallpaper (Tank Man, blown up and fuzzy, appears at 1.59), multiple screens flicker with old footage, and a life-size replica of the Goddess of Democracy, who dominated the square in 1989, looms out of the darkness at 2.37.

Exploiting the space of sameness between humor and spectrality, the video flic-flacs between playful and somber moods in ways that chafe against the public secret in the one part of China where that secret is not maintained – itself another anomalous ripple on its clandestine surface, which gestures to the vaster idiosyncrasy that June 4th is a banned memory for about two-thirds of the population of China and a black hole, or whitewashed wall, for the youthful rest. The video also repeatedly uses camera technology to do this work of mild abrasion, not just through the filmic medium, but via the digital camera, tripod, smartphones, images-as-wallpaper, and flickering screens. The ‘cast’ of the video are all young, which on one level simply reflects Hong Kong’s status as a blind spot for the June 4th secret, as mentioned a moment ago; but on another it also ties in with the idea of Tank Man as a playful digital quest – ghostbusting almost – tracked down by those who never heard his name at school (even in Hong Kong) via digital technologies that are increasingly moving off the web and into physical space.

This notion of digital questing, and via camera-based platforms, steps up a notch in a recent work by the anonymous artistic collective 4Gentlemen (a pseudonym used by the Lily and Honglei art studio). Entitled Tian’anmen Squared, it uses the smartphone technologies of augmented reality to allow Tank Man’s spirit to return to Beijing and stalk his former haunts (4Gentlemen, 2011). More commonly associated with military or gaming applications, augmented reality has shaped up in the last few years as a potent tool for conceptual artists. Its highwater mark so far is probably Amir Badaran’s Frenchising Mona Lisa, an app which allows users to train their phones on any version of Da Vinci’s painting and watch as the enigmatic one miraculously removes her feather-light veil and wraps the Tricolore around her head as if it were a hijab. French secularism, sartorial hypocrisy (why are some scarves ok and others not?), curatorial control, the whims of iconography, and the shifting status of the artist all coalesce as targets within the frame here. Criticized by some as a self-promoting prankster, Badaran argues for the value of augmented reality as a ‘legitimate installation art medium’ (Hube, 2014). He seeks, as he puts it, to ‘bring AR-as-art into the museum’ (Hube, 2014) and his abiding gripe is, indeed, with the Louvre as a stuffily sacrosanct institution which he debunks via invasionary attacks, essentially breaking into the museum to make his mischief. These notions of appropriate space-use, and how to violate it, have been crucial to augmented reality as an art form, as interventionist installations such as Sander Veenhof and Mark Skwarek’s 2010 AR exhibition in MoMA showed very clearly. Over 30 artists took part in the ‘art invasion’ exhibition, showing their works all over the building and effectively annexing the museum space for any visitor who had the app installed.

Needless to say, this idea of spatial pranking has broader implications. Some of these have been mapped, quite literally, by 4Gentlemen, who have used the AR application Layar to invade the space of Tian’anmen Square and its surrounds with verboten memories. Once downloaded onto a smartphone, the app uses geolocation software to superimpose a computer-generated icon of Tank Man, sized to the original scale, at the exact GPS co-ordinates on Chang’an Avenue just off the square in Beijing where the face-off between man and machine took place. In keeping with the photographic nature of this enterprise, the app also allows users to take pictures of the scene in the viewfinder, with the Tank Man icon overlaid. On one level, then, the Tian’anmen Squared project shares space with the work of Baradan, Veenhof, and Skwarek, infiltrating consecrated ground with below-the-radar visual messaging – but with a sharper twist. Tian’anmen Squared is not simply iconoclastic (Frenchising Mona Lisa) and anti-establishment (squatting in MoMA); it does not merely work on or alongside existing canonical works. Its impulse is also recuperative, since it reinstates at the original flashpoint of its occurrence a virtual icon of memory which state censorship has attempted to wipe from the public ‘hard drive’. Tank Man – the wraith, the disappeared, the deleted – thus stages a defiant return to the square, commandeered back from US liberalist discourse and installed once more in the highly localized site of his political agency, while also mimicking, through his hidden presence in the open air of central Beijing, the very machinations of the public secret.

Like most AR technologies, Tian’anmen Squared merges public space with sudden and clandestine computer-generated icons, but here publicness is both more municipal and more prosaic than in Frenchising Mona Lisa, which takes the rarified air of the Louvre as its stage. Tian’anmen Squared, by contrast, launches from the backdrop of air pollution, traffic noise, and the locale which, more than any other in China, denotes and connotes public space as state power – and is, for that reason, highly surveilled. The app user, surrounded by a mass of vehicles, pedestrians, and sightseers, connects with the forbidden image of Tank Man in a move which echoes Chen Shaoxiong’s Ink History in its staging of the public secret, but heightens the sense of raw theatre through its outdoor performance, and the way it turns user into actor. The public secret as drama also plays out within the app’s visual field. The ambient streetscene is viewed in two planes on the smartphone until the Tank Man graphic – the secret – appears, sleekly contoured, pinpoint-sharp, and rendered along three axes so that its dimensionality ‘steps out’ from the rest of the pictorial field (Figure 13), chromatically and perspectivally compelling despite being invisible to all around, almost grail-like in its sudden onscreen materialization. Ultimately, the effect of Tian’anmen Squared is, once again, to combine the spectral and the comedic (or at least the playfully subversive) with this notion of digital quest.

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Figure 13

4Gentlemen: Tiananmen Squared, 2011.

Indeed, although 4Gentlemen call Tank Man reloaded a ‘virtual monument’, it might be truer to argue, as already suggested, that the project exemplifies Lev Manovich’s point that if the 1990s were about the virtual, ‘It is quite possible that this decade of the 2000s (and beyond) will turn out to be about the physical – that is physical space filled with electronic and visual information’ (Manovich, 2006). Taking Tank Man out of the ether and onto the street is, in this sense, entirely of a piece with other shifts in Chinese digital culture, which, as Michel Hockx has pointed out, is presently trialing the move from the World Wide Web to the freer climes of the app format. Hockx describes how online literary superstar Han Han has created a new app for accessing his work which makes use of ‘the functionalities of Internet connectivity [while] entirely bypassing the browser-based media of the World Wide Web’ (Hockx, 2015: 106).

Although Han Han has explicitly denied that his aim is to avoid censorship, the app format certainly opens up ‘new, independent avenues’ (Hockx, 2015: 107) for digital expressivity. Rendering Tank Man as an app fits neatly within this rationale, chasing down further the notion mooted in the ‘Directions to the Museum’ video: namely, that in the face of conspiracies to silence, which now focus near-obsessively on control of the internet (as shown by the Baidu search results for Tian’anmen), web-inflected physical space may emerge as an agile zone for the performance of what we might now rightly call rituals of revelation. The app, and to a lesser extent the video, are practices which allow users to embody in physical space and corporeal movement the keyboard commands of ‘find’ and ‘search’ – though the term ‘questing’ may indeed be more apposite here, since it captures better the extent to which the pursuit of Tank Man in contemporary China has an almost ceremonial character. Again, the point is not exposure, or even, necessarily, direct contestation. The quest can be justly called ritualistic or ceremonial because it is through the performance of looking – not via any object thus found, let alone exposed – that the lineaments of the public secret are held up for scrutiny.

In this sense, it is unsurprising that the underlying logic of Tian’anmen Squared reiterates the theme of inbetweenness that is immanent to both the public secret and the other artistic forms discussed here which seek to do it revelatory justice. The app is both web-driven and yet browser-free, digital and yet grounded in the materiality of the body as it moves. Above all, it exploits again and again the status of the repurposed photograph as an interstitial object. Using the app generates a complex mise-en-abîme, in which the security cameras record the user who scopes the street with his or her smartphone until the graphic of man and tank appears on screen, the vehicle’s guns trained telescopically on the user too. At this point, the user may decide, as mentioned earlier, to take a screenshot of man and tank superimposed over the streetscene. In short, the app enables no fewer than five separate camera/photographic operations, an emphatic profusion which begs its own set of questions. On one level, this is just an organic response to the memoryscape all around: just as power flows from the barrel of a (tank) gun, to paraphrase Mao Zedong, so is history now inescapably filtered through the lens. The augmented reality app of Tank Man performs this shift repeatedly, from original photograph to computer graphic, from computer graphic back to mixed media smartphone photograph, from virtual environment to the square, and from that physical location back to the screen.

Tank Man Redux

What’s more, the app, by its very nature, is designed to rove and roam from location to location, as we see in Figure 14, which shows Tank Man in Union Square. In so doing, these iterative journeys, from square to square and beyond, seem to parlay directly with Ai Weiwei’s well-known Studies of Perspective series (Toushi yanjiu, 1993–2003), in which the artist photographs himself flicking the bird to various landmarks of authority: the White House, the Eiffel Tower, Red Square, the basilica in the Piazza San Marco, the Reichstag, the Mona Lisa (again). In naming the series as a whole Studies of Perspective, Ai Weiwei’s main point of propaganda is to make the middle finger matter more than the monument, to undermine the icons of establishment power with an equally iconic gesture of disrespect. Yet the linchpin, the coruscating core, of the series is Studies of Perspective: Tian’anmen Square, and the power of that semi-selfie snapshot, taken only six years after the crackdown, derives from its allusive and politically aggravating geometric similarity to Tank Man (Figure 15). Ai’s insurgent middle finger, at the bottom left of the foreground, stands in for the lone protestor, while the tanks become the Gate of Heavenly Peace, adorned with Mao’s huge portrait – which has been obliterated by Ai’s finger. In both images, the stand-off occurs across the same bottom-left/top-right diagonal axis, in the midst of emptied public space. But the crushing downwards momentum of Tank Man – in which the tanks have ‘advanced across most of the pictorial field along the lines and vectors on the street indicating the forward direction of the traffic’ (Hariman and Lucaites, 2007: 217) – is reversed as Ai’s finger protrudes as an aggressive repoussoir, taking the place of the tanks and bearing down not on the protester but on the site of state power. The planed patterning of the road markings in the original Tank Man shots, which tamely follow the convoy of vehicles, is undone in Ai’s photo, which scatters these narrow white lines across the visual field.

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Figure 14

4Gentlemen: Tiananmen Squared, 2011.

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Figure 15

Ai Weiwei: A Study of Perspective: Tian’anmen Square, 1993–2003.

A Study of Perspective: Tian’anmen Square is Tank Man redux, then, with a vengeance. If so, it is ultimately predictive about the remixing of icons in digital times, and in China most particularly. Already with Ai’s photograph – a gelatin silver print, and thus an analog object par excellence – we witness a process at work that revs up noticeably under digitality. Even as echoes of Tank Man ricochet left and right across Ai’s photo, Tian’anmen Square also testifies to the partial dissolution of that source image, or rather to its capacity to absorb intrusive adaptation whilst retaining its strong recognition quotient. As an über-image, Tank Man may twist and bend, yet the centre can still hold, in much the same way that an aesthetic remediation of the black-and-white photograph of the gate at Auschwitz, emblazoned with the infamous words ‘Arbeit macht frei’, could be composed of matchsticks and still refer unmissably back to its photographic point of origin. Under digitality – within the universe of memes – remakes and remixes of photographic icons have proliferated, for the obvious reason that the speed, profusion, and plasticity of the online environment vastly multiply the opportunities for reversioning. In a non-censored web, though, these repeated remediations tend, in practice, to belong quite tightly within the same genus: they are clear scions of their photographic patriarch, as we see with ‘Syrian beach boy’, whose remakes – for all their quantity – are remarkably alike. Their purpose, after all, is in large part to keep memory refreshed, so it scarcely behooves such remediations to stray too far from the master image. This ‘family resemblance’, to borrow Wittgenstein’s term, typically breaks down when Tank Man is remediated in Chinese online spaces, for the simple reason that secrecy, not forgetfulness, is the core antagonist against which the remix is battling – and battling secrecy, as discussed earlier, requires clandestine tactics.

Lily and Honglei speak directly to this genealogical disintegration in a video work about June 4th, entitled Forbidden City (Zijincheng, 2008; Figure 16), which melds digital animation with traditional Chinese paper cuts. The piece opens with an image of an old-fashioned tea-shop window, hung with a red paper-cut decoration of the character fu, meaning prosperity and happiness. A flower has been cut out in each corner of the decoration, a face-value reference to the ‘Four Gentlemen’ of Chinese artistic and botanical tradition (plum blossom, orchid, bamboo, and chrysanthemum) – and an encrypted allusion to the so-called ‘Four Gentlemen’ of the Tian’anmen Square protests: a quartet of activists, including Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo, who went on hunger strike in June 1989 (and after whom the conceptual art collective are, in fact, named). As a guqin plays on the soundtrack, the paper cut disintegrates into falling petals, until only five tiny red marks remain. The camera then closes in on these shapes, revealing them to be the lone protester, three tanks, and the Forbidden City itself. For the next two minutes, the tanks and the protester – the component parts of the original Tank Man photograph – abandon their assigned places to move disjointedly and at random across the screen, until the inevitable hard collision between man and machine occurs and a spectral swirl of blood is superimposed across the visual field. It drifts like a fractal for several seconds before floating away, just as the falling petals reassemble into the character fu, the swirl of blood melts into steam from a teacup, and the scene returns to the tea shop as if the bloodshed had never happened. Narratively, the animation rehearses the same interplay between spectrality and ‘see no evil’ which I have traced throughout this article, at the time as metaphorizing the idea that China’s rise since the 1990s is predicated on precisely this silent collusion with a violent order – or, as Jiang Zemin put it in his famous motto for the post-Tian’anmen era, ‘Keep your mouth shut and get rich’ (mensheng fadacai). Meanwhile on the meta-plane, via its dismemberment of the Tank Man photograph, the video acts out the process of reductionist redux, the stripping down to barest bones that icons must undergo if they are to maintain some kind of visibility in suppressive environments.

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Figure 16

Lily and Honglei: Forbidden City, 2008.

In a recent article, Ying Qian lays out the toolkit of tactics that activist documentarians in China use to ‘out’ secrets, in particular the regime of opacity that the state and local government created in the wake of the Sichuan earthquake to conceal bad practice in the construction of public school buildings that led to the deaths of thousands of children. Qian uses the term ‘re-tweet’ to describe how Ai Weiwei and fellow artist-activist Ai Xiaoming serially reference each other’s work as a means of getting information out and then keeping it in play. As she puts it, Twitter has ‘influenced the cinematic form’, inducing a quickfire intertextual responsiveness that can parry attempts at containment (Qian, 2014: 304). More important than the specifically Twitter-esque form of this referencing, though, are its seriality and the way it creates a (visual) in-language, whose powers are enhanced by the fact that the internet police want to suppress it. Precisely because these are prohibited speech acts, their audiences listen out all the more carefully for them, whatever their guise. For Tank Man watchers, this sense of being on the qui vive is never stronger than when the anniversary of June 4th looms – as a feature in the South China Morning Post which went online on June 4th 2013 shows. The article consists of a live feed, which updated readers throughout the day by ‘re-tweeting’ the various photos, memes, and ‘veiled references’ to the events of 1989 that were circulating in virtual climes. Halfway down the page, a photograph of Ai Weiwei appears (Figure 17). The image is familiar, since it riffs on one of the artist’s best known works – Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn – in which Ai was photographed in a slo-mo triptych smashing an ancient ceramic vase. Here, though, the vase has been Photoshopped out in favour of a tank, in a deft piece of serial-style visual shorthand that connotes both Tank Man and Ai Weiwei’s single-finger salute to the Chinese state in Studies of Perspective. In Figure 18, entitled ‘Duang’ (2015), Badiucao brings the chain of allusion full circle by making Ai smash to smithereens the Gate of Heavenly Peace.

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Figure 17

Ai Weiwei, Photoshopped, 2013.

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Figure 18

Badiucao: ‘Duang’, 2015.

Rather like the inventive ways in which netizens have exploited the many homophones in the Chinese language to reference keywords banned by the censors, remediations of Tank Man murmur to each other through coded spectral ‘re-tweets’ which, like the dubiously-named parlour game ‘Chinese whispers’, morph as the message moves step by step along the chain. This process can be seen in another photographic series, Mirrors (Jingzi), by Li Wei, in which the disembodied head of the artist is made to float in ambient space – thanks not to Photoshop but to Li’s use of a specially designed mirror with a hole in the center, which reflects the surrounding scene in reverse (Figure 19). Picking up – mirroring – Ai Weiwei’s refrain in Studies of Perspective, the series moves transnationally from site to iconic site, but reaches its climactic point at the square in a photo-work called ‘Reversing Tiananmen’. Li’s head, facing the camera against the backdrop of the square, in which the familiar shapes of vehicles, road markings, and street lights are discernible, hovers in the lower left quadrant of the image like a decapitated Tank Man who has finally turned round to show himself. On a narrative level, the image once again rebukes the conspiracy of silence: ‘the ghostly head is the only “real” object … [while] the tidy square, which reveals no trace of the violence committed there, turns out to be the illusion, a mere reflection’ (Berry, 2008: 305). But its own visual language is no less in thrall to secrecy as it loops back to Tank Man via a self-referential aesthetic code that covers its tracks.

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Figure 19

Li Wei: Mirrors, 2000.

In short, the remediations of Tank Man I have discussed here exemplify the digital icon at large within censored space, and in protean and phantasmagorical form. On China’s web, where he is so fugitive and ephemeral – spectral, by any other name – repurposings of his image can stray further than ever from the original photographs and yet remain instantly, effortlessly, identifiable to those in the know. Indeed, to be unlike Tank Man, and yet to be recognized as him nonetheless, lies at the core of his necessary ghostliness in a society split by secrecy, just as devising his off-kilter reincarnations is what propels the creativity of his re-makers. Appropriately, Tank Man’s ability to disassociate himself from his primary incarnation, and to be re-born in cognate guises, gives his spectrality a mobile, lingering character that is in some ways more poignant in its haunting than any high-fidelity remediation could be. In this sense, Tank Man may be more iconic in the nooks and crannies of digital China, the place that has supposedly ‘forgotten’ him, than anywhere else. Rather than ‘the elephant in the room’ – the familiar metaphor for a public secret known to everyone, and for that reason never manifest as anything other than an elephant – Tank Man is the shape-shifting symbol of what we might call the partially public secret: entirely invisible to some, yet always conspicuous to others, even when sometimes he barely resembles himself – or may not be there at all. A photo-performance by Beijing-based artist Song Dong, entitled ‘Breathing’ (Haqi, 1996), offers an example of this latter point. The artist lay for 40 minutes in winter on the cold concrete of Tian’anmen Square, exhaling onto the pavement until a thin layer of ice had formed. The trace left behind was ghostly, of course; but it also breathed life back into Tank Man, whose passing was intimated by Song Dong’s supine position. The point here is not the risk of over-interpretation, of seeing Tank Man where he does not exist, but rather the long shadow cast by his forbidden specter, which actively stimulates ghost-hunting.

It has become commonplace – de rigeur, almost – to describe China’s relationship with its troubled modern past as ‘amnesiac’, whether the history in question is June 4th, the Cultural Revolution, or the many other episodes of violence and trauma that blighted lives under Maoism and beyond. But for those who passed through the vortex, forgetfulness is surely a chimera, a pipe dream even. Memory, with its associated vocabulary cluster, is often far less useful as a set of interpretive tools in this environment than the discourses of secrecy, since it is China’s status as a dedicated and effective cryptocracy, rather than as the ‘People’s Republic of Amnesia’ (to quote the title of a recent study by Louisa Lim), which explains why so much of the past lies shrouded from public view. No one pretends that this ‘amnesia’ is memory loss, a natural process of attrition; it is well understood as the result of a sustained official blockade on commemoration – what writer Yan Lianke has called ‘a state-sponsored sport’ (2013). For this reason, in fact, the term ‘amnesia’ often has a satirical flourish, a tendency that reaches an apotheosis in Ma Jian’s novel Beijing Coma (Beijing zhiwuren, 2008), which uses the trope of catatonic stupor to metaphorize the mnemonic landscape. Yet the term remains a misnomer, even when deployed in satire, since China, rather than being a nation of amnesiacs, is divided between those who cannot forget but stay mostly silent, and those who have never, or barely, learned about the events which are seared across the cortex of their elders, and so have nothing to unremember.

Rather like the term ‘ethnic cleansing’, which has come to denote the entirely filthy practices of forced emigration, deportation, and genocide, ‘amnesia’ in the Chinese context has become the euphemistic descriptor for a relationship with the past which is the very opposite of forgetful. Indeed, we might wonder at the prevalence of the term ‘amnesia’ in discussions of the memory embargo in China, not least because of its associations with mind control, brain-washing, and the notion of a passive populace, devoid of agency. Already objectionable in its recall of Cold War paranoia about the Yellow Peril, the top-down enforcement suggested by the idea of memory wipe also elides the extent to which China’s citizens participate in the silence about June 4th; keeping secrets, as Simmel pointed out long ago, is a highly social, group-based business (1906: 464). By calling secrecy ‘amnesia’, it might be argued that the discourse of forgetfulness is simply using euphemism for the purpose for which it was designed: namely, the covering up of unpleasant truth. But to allow not just the past but societal secrecy itself to remain veiled by semantics – to misname it ‘amnesia’, in other words – is to fail to interrogate why silence happens and the complex uses to which it is put. Small wonder that artist Sheng Qi repeatedly uses the motif of dripping in his 2007 series on Tian’anmen, including his remediation of Tank Man (Figure 20): this is not merely brainwashing but a washing away of responsibility. And the focus on forgetting has also meant that what Belinda Kong evocatively calls the ‘hermeneutics of evasion’ – the covert strategies of ‘metaphor or metonymy, catachresis or ellipses’ which artist-activists use to engage the cryprocratic apparatus on its own terms – have not received as much attention as they deserve (Kong, 2012: 27).

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Figure 20

Sheng Qi: Untitled, 2007.

Memorability, as discussed at the beginning of this article, is increasingly achieved through the repetitive labor of the highly networked remake on the ‘free’ web – a state which is not really possible for Tank Man on the Chinese internet, even if it were desired. Yet what the repurposings I have explored here show, first of all, is that remakes can do more than simply keep memories serially ‘refreshed’, in both technical and affective terms; and, secondly, that there might be more productive states than being merely memorable or searchable online. In particular, remediations of Tank Man suggest that the spectral/playful mode which these image-works capture so keenly has the capacity to rub up more frictively against the operations of partial public secrecy than any regular reminders. Indeed, memorability in this context starts to look rather like exposure, a faux-threat against which open secrets have their own ‘built-in protection’. In this sense, the concluding point to make here is not that these various repurposings of Tank Man prove that one day the dynasty will change, his secret will be busted open, and democracy will come to China (whether China wants it or not). Public secrecy is everywhere, as are its offshoots in the strategic silences which prevail in communities, in the family, in our most intimate relationships. They are hardly a post-socialist, propaganda-state phenomenon. If these remixes of Tank Man show anything, it is that we need to live intuitively and creatively with the well-known but papered-over facts that permit a given social order to continue in the absence of a collective will to candor. These remakes are not incitements to truth, but rather complementary objects which via their very structure call attention to the sinister yet ridiculous character of that failure. They represent the distortions – to repurpose is, after all, on some level to distort – which an antagonistic complicity with public secrecy requires.

Artist Sheng Qi may offer the last word here. After the protests, he chose to remember the pain of June 4th in a uniquely radical way: he sliced off his little finger and buried it in a flower pot. In the years since, he has repeatedly used this mutilated hand in his work, most notably in a series called – what else? – Memories (Jiyi, 2000), in which tiny black-and-white family photographs nestle poignantly in its traumatized palm (Figure 21). Yet Sheng has never told his young son why he has no finger: ‘Whenever his son asks him what happened, he jokes that he lost his finger on a bus. His son knows that he’s lying, Sheng Qi admits, but he has decided not to tell him the truth’ (Lim, 2014: 96). When asked why, Sheng responds, ‘I want to protect him’.

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Figure 21

Sheng Qi: Memories.