Chinese museum forced to remove exhibit after complaints of racism
Complaints of racism led a Chinese museum to pull an exhibit this week that showed African faces juxtaposed with wild animals.
Titled 'This Is Africa', the exhibit was placed at the Hubei Provincial Museum in the city of Wuhan and displayed a number of photographs, each one containing a photo of an African person and a face of an animal.
People were quick to make reference to racism, including one particular photograph that had a child with his mouth open and a gorilla with its mouth open, The Guardian reports.
The images were taken by Yu Huiping, a construction magnate who has won awards for his work.
One of the exhibit's curators, Wang Yuejun, said the comparisons to animals were seen as a compliment to Chinese culture.
“The target audience is mainly Chinese,” Wang said in a statement.
Wang said that the museum understood the images offended “our African friends” and the pictures were removed to show respect for their concerns.
More than 141,000 people visited the show with the nature of the images first pointed out by Edward E Duke, who wrote a now deleted Instagram post asking why the museum “put pictures of a particular race next to wild animals".
There have been several other incidents when it comes to China and race.
Last year, a Chinese detergent TV advertisement went viral and sparked international outrage after it showed an African man being transformed by a washing machine into a fresh-faced Chinese man.
And China's most popular chat app WeChat was also forced to apologise after it emerged that it used the English N-word to translate a Chinese phrase that commonly means “black foreigner”.
