Ma Yongfeng

Bernard Controls Project, 2012

Installation | 3 matresses | Installation dimensions variable

In Chinese industrial tradition, revolutionary quotes, generally from Mao’s poems, speeches or writings were often painted in large characters on the walls of the factories where millions of workers had to see them every day. Ma Yongfeng reinterprets this aspect of Chinese propaganda, creating some large graffiti’s in Bernard Controls Beijing.

The sentences have been chosen from random conversations with the workers or the managers, picked from the panels of the working rules, or from the factory’s safety procedures and other similar sources. Each sentence explores an aspect of life inside the working environment: the need to adapt to a strict control system, the human desire to evade and dream, the pressure of efficiency and the humor to be able to deal with all this.

The walls of Bernard Controls Beijing host a new subtle aspect of propaganda, the artistic propaganda for independent and creative thinking.

Biographie

Ma Yongfeng (*1971 Shanxi, China) lives and works in Beijing, China.