In China, a photo exhibition was closed, where Africans were compared to wild animals
An exhibition has opened in the Chinese museum, where photographs with black faces were placed next to the muzzles of chimpanzees, baboons, lions, giraffes and other animals. The pictures hung for only a few days, after which the organizers were accused of racism, and the exhibition had to be closed. As her curator explained, this was done out of respect for "our African friends."
The exhibition "Here it is, Africa" opened on October 11 at the museum of the Chinese city of Wuhan, Hubei Province. The author of the pictures compared the faces of Africans and animal faces with similar emotions.
One of the first to call the exhibition offensive was Nigerian Edward Duke. In his Instagram, he asked why the museum places photos of people of a certain race and wild animals next to each other. This entry was later deleted.
According to the curator of the exhibition, Wang Yuejun, it was closed after numerous complaints from Africans, including those who live in China. 170 thousand people managed to see the photos.
Wang Yuejun assured that it was he who came up with the idea of combining people and animals into a kind of diptych, and not the author of the pictures. He explained that the target audience of the exhibition was mainly Chinese, and in China, comparing people with animals is considered a compliment and appears in many sayings. Yuejun recalled the eastern horoscope, in which people are compared with animals based on their year of birth.
The author of the pictures is photographer Yu Haiping, a construction magnate and vice president of the Hubei Province Photographers Association, who has been to Africa more than 20 times. According to him, he wanted to let the audience see the primitive life of Africa and connect the images of people, animals and plants.
At the opening of the exhibition, Haiping sold several of his works worth 5.1 million yuan (44.2 million rubles) and gave money to help those in need in Hubei Province.
In mid-October, another racist scandal occurred in China: the developers of the popular WeChat application in the country were forced to apologize for the fact that in their messenger the Chinese phrase "black foreigner" was translated into English as "niger".
And in 2016, the whole world was outraged by a Chinese commercial for washing powder, in which a black man was placed in a washing machine, after which a young man of Asian appearance in a snow-white T-shirt came out of it.
Keywords: China | Racism | Scandal | Photo exhibition