To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain

In the photograph of the performance piece To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain (1995), the era of cultural revolution and progress through the conquest of nature is satirically called into question with an image of piled human bodies bonding with a mountaintop. The image recalls the ancient tale “Foolish Old Man Moving Moun- tains,” which was a model of the triumph of human perse- verance over nature for many of China’s twentieth-century leaders, including Sun Yat-sen and Mao Zedong.