A lot of planning needs to be done for my Chinese human rights diorama. From what little I know about One-Child policy enforcement, rural families are most heavily persecuted, but the Femme Fatale figure I’ll be using for the mother just won’t do for that, so it will have to be an urban apartment. I am thinking there will be some kind of doorway separating the police from the children, with the mother standing on the threshold. I’ll need to construct some furniture, too.
One thing I want to do is incorporate symbolism, which is difficult to do for a culture that is not your own. I plan on doing my homework, especially before I paint any Chinese characters. One of the policemen will be holding out a piece of paper to the mother, a warrant or fine or something of that sort. I was also considering a caption on the base (translated “Inharmonious”), and maybe some printed characters on a child’s shirt, or on a poster on the wall.
One symbol I am thinking of incorporating is a River Crab, which is Chinese internet slang for Censorship, because the Chinese word for River Crab is a very near homophone for “Harmonious/Harmonize/Harmonization” (Chinese: 和谐) in the word “Harmonious society” (和谐社会), Chinese leader Hu Jintao’s signature ideology. (source: Wikipedia)
Anyway, those are just a few idea I’m floating around. I don’t have any concrete plans yet.
One thought for you, Instead of having the mother directly interacting with the police yet, have her inside the house either A. with her back and ear to the closed door, listening to their approach, or B. same thing but behind a drape on a window by the door glancing out.
If I am not mistaken, guns are illegal for anyone but the government to own in China, so if they see her with the gun, she’d no longer be being given a citation or paper, she’d be gunned down immediately, so I think a few moments before the confontation would add to the sense of the drama about to unfold.
Just my 2-cents.
That’s a great idea, Andy! I just put together a “rough sketch” of the scene with insulation foam, and I’ll put photos up shortly, but there’s no reason I couldn’t rearrange things.