Taiwan's Cihu Sculpture Park: Welcome to the one man show

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Maybe it is one of the bizarres places all over the world, very shure one of the strangest and cruelest: Imagine you're standing on a green meadow between more than 200 statues – and all of them are showing the same face, the same smile, the same eyes and brows.

Welcome to the Cihu Memorial Sculpture Park, a very mad circus of an once very powerful man. Here you will see 227 statues of Chiang Kai-shek, the former founder and long time president of Taiwan, the Republic of China, a small island at the end of the world.

Father and Generalissimo

Kai-shek (蔣介石) once was the father of this republic, a Generalissimo and hard working anti-communist who ruled the small China with an iron hand. And the son of a wine dealer loved it to see his own face all along the country and for this reason Taiwan is still full of reminders of the authoritarian era under his government.

1,814 sites, monuments and office spaces named in memory of him, an average of one for every 20km2 in the whole nation. And in addition 1,235 monuments, statues, sculptures and large-frame portraits commemorating the father of the nation and father of succesor Chiang Ching-kuo.

But after Chiang Kai-sheks death the statues of him were more and more unwanted for public spaces in Taiwan. Protesters paint them on, they broke some of them into parts and after the era of Kai-sheks son Ching-kuo the government decided to transport some 200 statues of the late autocratic leader to the quiet sanctuary of a park near his mausoleum in the north of the island.

Sitting, riding, reading

This is what they now call the Cihu Memorial Sculpture Park in Taoyuan (or Dayuan). Here you can see Chiang Kai-shek sitting and riding, standing and looking, reading, smiling and walking. He do it in stone, in copper, in red, in grey and in black.

He wears a hat or a uniform, a suit or he has a leash. All over the country the government has already eliminated nearly 70 percent of Chiang Kai-Shek statues and other symbols of authoritarianism in Taiwan. But at Cihu the semi-dictatorship of yore condenses into a one man show of once-omnipresent statues of the late dictator.

In other countries this kind of documents of the past have been attacked by activists or removed to dump, in Taiwan, former know as Formosa, the symbols of Taiwan’s authoritarian era have to be supposed to be removed too, renamed or “handled in other ways”.

But in her second life the statues of Chiang Kai-shek, removed from different locations around the nation, are new stars for thousands of visitors: They´ve been reborn as the centre of a very hot touristic hot spot close to his mausoleum.

A few more pictures for you: 

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