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The Century Mountain Project is an East/West collaboration of art between the Chinese poet and calligrapher Huang Xiang and American artist William Rock. Their paintings, which feature Huang Xiang's calligraphy and poetry and William Rock's painted portraits, honor outstanding thinkers, creators, discoverers, leaders—essentially people who stood out like mountains throughout the centuries. Their subjects include Mozart, Lincoln, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Rimbaud, Phillis Wheatley, Li Bai, Murasaki Shikibu, Malcolm X, Isadora Duncan, and Edgar Allan Poe. In 2009, their portrait of Anne Frank was exhibited at the Peter Wilhelm Art Center () in Budapest; and in June 2010 an exhibit of Huang Xiang and William Rock's Century Mountain paintings was organized by the city of Tarragona, Spain. The artwork created between Huang Xiang and William Rock began in 2006 and continues as an ongoing collaboration. There is no cultural, gender, or race distinctions with regard to the subjects depicted.
==Huang Xiang early life== Huang Xiang was born on December 26, 1941 in Guidong County of Hunan Province. At the time of his birth there occurred a great fire. The fire spreading through his neighborhood reached the very wall of the family compound; newborn Huang and his mother, still connected by the umbilical cord, had to be carried to safety to a nearby temple. Huang's father was in charge of supply for the army group that fought the GMD's last great campaign in Shenyang Province of Manchuria in 1948. The decisive battle there, 'Liaoshen,' was won by the communists, and Huang's father was captured. The family learned late in 1951 that earlier that year Huang's father had been summarily shot in a prison camp near Beijing. Huang Xiang was only nine years old when he first personally suffered similar treatment. One day in all innocence he pulled an ailing fish from the village well. Immediately the village headman grabbed him and accused him of poisoning the well. For three nights Huang was bound in a dark room, and paraded daily through the streets wearing a dunce cap bearing the legend "Huang Xiang counterrevolutionary poisoner of wells." He was only released when chemical analysis failed to detect any poison in the fish. Although an excellent student in grade school, he was not permitted to matriculate into middle school because of his class origins. The denial of public education left Huang Xiang feeling severely hurt, for he strongly desired to continue his schooling. The quandary was soon alleviated, however, when he discovered in a concealed loft in his grandparents, home a treasure trove of college books that his father had put away years earlier. Though aged only ten, he began reading them with a will. Most of the books were in Chinese; they included classic works of Lao Tzu, Zhuangzi, Li Bo and Du Fu, plus political treatises by Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek and others, as well as books of literature, political economy, philosophy, religion and the arts. there was also translation of major western authors, poets and statesman, plus the French "Declaration of Right" and the American "Declaration of Independence." moreover there were the extensive notes made by his father in a notebook, including quotations from Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, as well as Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Goethe, Marx, Freud and others. While working at a Metals Factory at the age of seventeen in 1958, Huang Xiang had several of his poems accepted for publication. These early efforts were entirely in the style accepted by the regime. Huang was invited to join the Guizhou branch of The All-China Writers Association, then its youngest member. Conformity is not one of his attributes, however, he soon became dissatisfied with the tight limitations on style and subject matter that prevailed, and determined to eschew them completely in the future. Bored with the unchanging Metal factory routine. ignoring the need for official permission, he boarded a train for the Gobi desert. With roving eyes always open, Huang Xiang soon spied and befriended a half-Tibetan girl who spoke educated Mandarin. Inspired by her, he wrote poetry and perhaps naively he mailed copies of these poems back to friends at the Metal factory. The poems were intercepted by a factory official and was alarmed other workers may want to leave and follow Huang Xiang. A security officer was sent to the Gobi to arrest him. To Huang's great humiliation, the arresting officer charged him in front of other workers "with being an active counterrevolutionary who hated the Communist party and intended to escape across the border." This marked Huang Xiang's introduction to the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet Gulags. Huang's cell was barely larger than a bed. It had no window only a hole in the ceiling. The stench was horrible. Huang received extra rough treatment, he was made to carry heavy bricks in the hot sun. During this period, he was accused of writing a reactionary slogan on a toilet wall. The rough treatment increased. One punishment was Huang had to stand on broken bricks with his wrists bound with wire tight enough to cut. He was forced to stand this way all night. The Party promptly expelled him from The Writers Association, and proposed an absolute ban on publishing his writing for forty years. Huang Xiang was eventually sent to various prison camps. Huang Xiang continued to secretly write poems. Once again Huang became a target and found himself in trouble with the authorities. He was sentenced to three years of hard labor, being required to sleep in a cattle shed and he was physically escorted to the hills to do extra hard work. In 1967, Huang Xiang was on the verge of entering a new phase of his life, beginning to write the serious poems that survive and that mark him as a man of ability, perception and courage. In 1968 Huang wrote the first of his major political poems, "Wild Beasts" which was well received by the salon. During this period Huang married his first wife Ai Youjun. They had a young son named Yingzi,"Yingzi" means eagle symbolizing freedom. Yingzi became ill and Huang requested permission at the work camp where he was assigned to visit his nine-month-old son in the hospital. His request was denied by the Revolutionary Committee. When he protested he received criticism and denunciation; when he refused to bow his head, they hung a heavy weight from his neck from a wire that drew blood. Soon Huang received a death notice from the hospital. Exploding in a frenzy, he bolted shouting from the compound and ran to the hospital. Finding the incubator empty, he was directed by an indifferent doctor to the morgue. After opening several crude coffins, he spied one that was partially broken, a rat jumped out. Opening it, he found his son. part of his ear had been bitten off, and he was bleeding from his eyes, nose and mouth. A finger moved. He was not even dead! Huang carried the small body to the main office, and was assigned a room for the night. Within hours Yingzi was dead. Huang was not at all silent in his anger and grief. An official came and berated Huang for disturbing the revolutionary order of the hospital. The next day Huang carried his son's lifeless body up a hill, and after sitting with him for some hours in a state of deep grief, buried him on a sunny slope above the city. Huang's disoriented wanderings in those devastating circumstances are set forth in his poem "Song of Life," dated October 29, 1970. 1 〔Emerson, A. "A Bilingual Edition of Poetry Out of Communist China by Huang Xiang" (2004) New York, The Edwin Mellen Press 〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Century Mountain」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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