Word: wu
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Before his appointment to this position, Wu Hung was imprisoned for three years in a labor camp on the Inner Mongolian border. Wu Hung was caught in China's Cultural Revolution, a time when Chairman Mao attempted to purge the country of traditional cultural and intellectual values...
China in the 1960s was a politically tense place, especially for those who showed an interest in Western ideas and culture. A student at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, Wu Hung was part of a small group of friends and fellow painters who shared an enthusiasm for Beatles records and Impressionist paintings, among other things. "Once the Cultural Revolution came," says Wu Hung, "all these things were seen in a political light...
...Although Wu Hung did not think of himself as counterrevolutionary, his comments about the prevalence of Communist propaganda were considered dangerous by the government "I suggested we paint Chairman Mao quotations on the inside of our eyeglasses," Wu Hung recounts. "I paid too much for this kind of joke...
...Wu Hung spent a year in his college's detention center before he was sent to a prison camp. "It was like they turned Adams House into a jail. They put me in a dark room, asked me to write down my faults, my crime," he says...
...Wu Hung does not see his experience as negative. He calls the Cultural Revolution the most significant time of his life. "Because both professors and students were prisoners, there were no boundaries. I stopped seeing my professors as big names, they became just human beings," says Wu Hung...