GODDESS OF DEMOCRACY - 1989
A white statue of a robed Chinese woman holding a torch aloft in both hands, her hair blown back as if by the wind. The statue was a version of the 33-foot-tall “Goddess of Democracy,” which sculpture students at China’s Central Academy of Fine Arts made and installed in Tiananmen Square, opposite a portrait of Mao Zedong, “so that it would confront him face-to-face.” [1] Like the pro-democracy demonstrations it represented, the Chinese statue was shattered on June 4, 1989, when troops cleared the Square, leaving hundreds of demonstrators dead. [2]
Inspired to replicate the students’ monument by seeing M.I.T. students protest the massacre, Van Sant rallied other LA-based members of the Artists Equity Association and the Visual Artists Guild to make a version of the Chinese statue. On June 12, 1989, they installed their statue, without the required city permits, on the LA City Mall Pedestrian Bridge, which Van Sant had designed fifteen years previously.
Despite its guerilla installation, LA’s Goddess of Democracy won backing from city officials and was allowed to remain on the pedestrian bridge for a week before being moved to the Spring Street entrance of LA’s City Hall for 90-days. The statue was eventually moved to Chinatown but was found at the entrance of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association “crushed and broken in pieces” in mid-July 1989. [3]
THE GODDESS OF DEMOCRACY IN ITS INITIAL LOCATION ON VAN SANT’S LA MALL PEDESTRIAN BRIDGE, C. 1989
THE GODDESS OF DEMOCRACY WITH MEMBERS OF THE TEAM, C. 1989
THE GODDESS OF DEMOCRACY IN TRANSIT, WITH MEMBERS OF THE TEAM THAT BUILT HER, C. 1989
RISING THE GODDESS OF DEMOCRACY AT THE FEDERAL BUILDING, LOS ANGELES, C. 1989
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Various sites in the City of Los Angeles.
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1989
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Wood, Styrofoam, plaster.
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23 feet tall, 1,500 lbs. in weight
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Destroyed
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TVS Digital Record
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While many people, including Van Sant, noted the similarities between the Goddess of Democracy and the U.S. Statue of Liberty, Tsao Tsing-yuan, an art historian present when the Chinese statue was made, has stated that “the principal inspiration for the face and head of the Goddess” was Vera Mukina’s A Worker and Collective Farm Woman (1937). [1] Not only was Mukina’s statue “still much admired in China,” but Soviet Realism was the “tradition favored within the Central Academy,” plus the Chinese students did not want their stance to be “taken as too openly pro-American.” [4]
Van Sant proposed to make a marble version of the statue that would be “an object waiting for the government of China to embrace the principles of personal liberty and freedom." However, no such statue was made. [5]
[1] Tsao Tsing-yuan, “The Birth of the Goddess of Democracy,” Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China, eds. Jeffrey N Wasserstrom, Elizabeth J. Perry, Boulder, Westview Press, 1994.
[2] The precise number of deaths is both unknown and hotly debated. Alan Donald, the then-British ambassador to China reported in a cable on June 5, 1989, that at least 10,000 had been killed (www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/tiananmen-square-massacre-death-toll-secret-cable-british-ambassador-1989-alan-donald-a8126461.html).
[3] Paul Feldman, “Another Shattering, ‘Goddess’ Statue in Chinatown Destroyed.” Los Angeles Times, August 1, 1989.
[4] Ibid.
[5] James Bronson, “Marble Goddess Awaits Her Call,” Daily Breeze, July 23, 1989.
