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Corpse show stages to provoke, to educate? China's first public corpse exhibition opened Thursday in Beijing, drawing both curiosity and criticism.
Dalian Medical Institute supplied all the 17 whole bodies and more than 160 body parts on display, which were all processed by Sui and his colleagues. Sui Hongjin, deputy director of the anatomy laboratory of Dalian Medical Institute, said the bodies were used for study at the institute and all died naturally. "The bodies were used for study at our institute, which was approved by the local government, and they all died naturally," claimed Sui Hongjin, deputy director of the institute's anatomy laboratory. Sui is the former business manager at Von Hagens' production site in Dalian, northeastern Liaoning Province. He left the German company and set up the Biological Plastination Co Ltd of the Dalian Medical Institute in 2000. All the 17 bodies and over 160 healthy and diseased body parts on display are the works of Sui and his colleagues. The plasticized bodies and body parts were processed to replace fluids and fat in bodies with special plastic materials, making the bodies durable for exhibition and study, said Sui.
The show has received little attention among the public in China, but there has been widespread criticism of similar exhibitions overseas. Organizers have relaxed restrictions to allow visitors to touch specimens if they are willing to, and, in order to attract more young people, students can buy half-price tickets, for 25 yuan (US$3) each. "I don't understand how could they plan to show a corpse as art in public. In Chinese tradition, people should respect the dead," said 56-year-old Wang Xiaolin, a retired teacher. However, Wang's 23-year-old daughter said she would like to go to the exhibition because it was "cool." "It would be an eye-opener, though I might have nightmares afterwards," she said.
"We may overreact at the first sight of those corpses in various poses. That's quite natural for a body-admired nation that shows awful respect to the deceased." refuted a male visitor surnamed Wang "We live in a very body-minded age. We have the cult of body-piercing. More and more people go to body-building clubs. Anxiety before death used to be of the day of judgement, but when society is more civilized, and medical knowledge is growing, we understand more and more that we have to fear our body deaths. But there is still this great mystery about the body to reveal. So comes the corpse exhibition, which can not be more reasonable." |
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