Beijing Project n.02 Ma Yongfeng 马永峰

In the Chinese industrial tradition, revolutionary quotations – usually from Mao’s poems, speeches or writings – were painted in large characters on factory walls, where millions of workers saw them every day.

Ma Yongfeng 马永峰 reinterpreted this form of propaganda by creating seven large wall writings at Bernard Controls in Beijing. The sentences were taken from chance conversations with workers and managers, from the panels of working rules, from the factory’s safety procedures and from similar sources.

Each sentence explores an aspect of life at work: the need to adapt to a strict system of control, the human desire to escape and dream, the pressure of efficiency, and the humour needed to cope with it all. The factory walls thus hosted a new, subtle form of propaganda: an artistic propaganda for independent and creative thinking.