Post by Sabine-Inken Schmidt

When I first looked at the label for Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s Der Chinese (The Chinese Man), my mind immediately jumped to the contemporary artist Tavares Strachan. First, to answer the question of age: this terracotta sculpture is exactly 158 years old, having been created in 1868. Even though Carpeaux worked in the 19th century and Strachan is a modern Bahamian conceptual artist, I see a profound connection between them regarding cultural visibility, identity, and forced assimilation. The label details the history of the Manchu-style braid, which was forced upon Chinese men under Qing rule as a violent demonstration of loyalty. This painful, hidden political reality reminded me of Tavares Strachan's monumental project, The Encyclopedia of Invisibility, where he unearths thousands of marginalized people and narratives left out of traditional history books. Carpeaux’s sculpture relied on an anonymous model whose true identity remains invisible to us today. This is precisely the type of erased history that Strachan seeks to reconstruct and empower through his own art, proving that modern perspectives help us decode the complex political layers of the past. Kunsthalle München