In the last issue of Portfolio I came across a small article about the lack of progress on the Martin Luther King Jr. monument in Washington. Among the discussions of committees and funding issues was this:

“One person who is on schedule: sculptor Lei Yixin. He could begin chiseling the slain civil rights leader’s likeness into granite this summer. When finished, the statue will be cut into pieces, shipped from China to Washington, and reassembled.”

This was the final blow to my typical nonchalant attitude to foreign imports and outsourcing. Toys, clothes, chemicals, cars, and everything else under the sun, are imported from China and various other countries where the cost of labour is cheaper or other efficiencies can be found knocked me in the gut. I typically view outsourcing as an economic issue, not an ethical one. As a Canadian I would usually stake or little concern about which nationality chips King’s likeness into rock—either Chinese or American—but this instance spurred an immediate reaction that is still playing in my mind.

Barbie and Hot Wheels can be considered cultural artifacts just as much as a statue or monument, but the exporting of history and memory production lays the cultural definition or substance of that artifact in the hands of someone who (regardless of his research) cannot fully appreciate what King and the civil rights movement means to Americans.

Everything around us, from my Canon WS-220TS calculator to the piles of magazines around me, are cultural and historical artifacts. Each tells us a story.

Two alternatives for this particular story are:

1) One that is blurred by the American dependence on other nations for less expensive products.

2) The other, fully transparent, would represent all that Martin Luther King Jr. was to Americans during his short time and up to the present.

Monuments, like architecture, should act as mechanisms of spatial change, transporting the ‘user’ to a difference place, frame of mind, or feeling. True monuments are not mere epitaphs. No one, other than those who experienced the degradation and elation, the feeling of hope during King’s time, has the emotional or cultural tools to build anything more than a simple gravestone or tourist trap.

UPDATE: Just found this article on NPR about a Beijing play about MLK’s life and struggle. Link.

FURTHER UPDATE: Authorities in China have discoverd that Free Tibet flags have been and still are being produced for export in a Chinese factory. Link.

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Posted on Saturday, April 26th, 2008 at 12:15 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.