Huang Xiang

A collection of photos taken by me and edited with photoshop. He came to my school because the art he is working with, William Rock, is a cousin of my teacher.

A Brief Biography of Huang Xiang.

In so many ways, Huang Xiang's life is the stuff of epic screenplays. He has written that he was "born in fire". During his birth a fire swept through the neighborhood and relatives were forced to carry mother and child, the umbilical cord still anchored in the womb, to safety.

He struggled through, and often suffered through, his formative years. His father was captured and shot at the end of the Communist Revolution. The family's land and much of their personal property was confiscated. At the age of 9 he was accused of poisoning a well to kill the "peasants". He was kept for three days in a dark room and paraded through the streets each day in a dunce cap. He was released when no poison was found.

Because of his social class, he was not permitted to continue beyond elementary school. However, he found his father's book in the attic of his grandparent's home and a poem written by his father, which may have inspired his own writing.

When he was seventeen, at the start of the Great Leap Forward, Huang Xiang became restless and worn from the persecution due to his social class. He traveled to a remote western plain called Da Qaidam. There he met a young woman and wrote romantic poetry. One of these poems was intercepted and he was arrested for being an "active counterrevolutionary who hated the Communist Party". He was sent to a lao gai dui, the Chinese equivalent to a gulag.

Between 1959 and 1995, Huang Xiang was imprisoned six times. At one labor camp he was struck by the brutal treatment of the workers and the effect it had on them. He saw one young man die of exhaustion after having been forced to hard labor for seventy-two hours non-stop.