Clemens Stecher

A series of three paintings in seven panels summing up a story basically taken from “Wily Wolf”, an illustrated children’s book for learning English published during the cultural revolution. Various small animals build a trap for a wolf in which he falls and is beaten to death by the little creatures, they build up the trap again at the end of the story, for the next wolf. It was so violent on one hand and sort of nicely drawn on the other I decided to use it, trying to capture the atmosphere. The image of Lei Feng was one of my first impressions when I arrived in Beijing, on Lei Feng Day I saw many people wearing Buttons with his counterfeit. I found out that a number of heroic people in the history of communist China is worshipped similar to the way saints are worshipped in christian cultures. When I later found the exact image of Lei Feng used in the buttons printed on the cover of a magazine I decided to put it in, all chinese people who saw it in the painting immediately remembered it. The whole piece was finished in less than two weeks before my departure in May 2012.