I see dead people

Touring shows of corpses have become a worldwide phenomenon -- and cause for scandal. Why are we so eager to look at a man holding his own flayed skin?

By Jon Mooallem

Jun 5, 2005 | The first thing you see when you walk into the installation "The Universe Within" is a dead Chinese man with very little skin. His hands are triumphantly on his hips, and he's made to revolve slowly on a turntable like a track and field trophy. A large rhombus of muscle is partially carved off his buttocks and peeled forward, and if you look closely at its edge you notice the familiar, pinkish marbling of a raw flank steak. And then you have an indescribable little epiphany: You realize that you're looking at this gentleman's actual flanks.

"The Universe Within," now at San Francisco's Nob Hill Masonic Center, is a traveling road show of 21 provocatively posed human bodies and a menagerie of organs, all embalmed by a process called "plastination," in which body fluids are replaced with liquid plastic. It hails from China and joins two other wildly successful touring exhibits: "Body Worlds" and "Body Worlds 2" (currently in Chicago and Cleveland, respectively). Those exhibits are promoted by plastination's inventor, Gunther von Hagens, and have grossed nearly $1 billion worldwide. They've also incited almost perpetual controversy, due in part to von Hagens' Barnum-esque eccentricities. (Most notoriously, after bullet holes were found in two of his specimens' heads, he was accused of, but never charged with, using the bodies of executed Chinese prisoners. Then in March, when the Body Worlds 2 exhibit was in Los Angeles, someone walked off with a 13-week-old plastinated fetus.)

But after "The Universe Within" debuted in San Francisco in March, it quietly went about its business for two full months before arousing suspicions from local government and scandalizing the citizens. Last week, San Francisco's ABC affiliate reported that the bodies were leaking a viscous combination of silicone and liquid human fat (signs of a "rush job," according to anonymous plastination experts cited by the news station). Moreover, the station reported, the corpses were not the property of the Medical University of Beijing, as initially claimed by one of the exhibit's promoters, an Austrian TV producer named Gerhard Perner. The university has never heard of Perner.

So whose bodies are they?

"Where the bodies came from in terms of donors, they don't tell us anything," a docent of the exhibit told the station's investigative team. "They tell us, 'Don't talk about that.'"

These revelations led to protests by Chinese-Americans who, fearing the worst, are likely imagining an otherwise unimaginable class of human rights violations. "There are red flags popping up all over the place," said city Supervisor Fiona Ma, a Chinese-American herself. She's now working to shut down the show and to bar such exhibits from the city without clear proof of the donors' consent.

But those flags have been flying high for the past two months. A reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle sent to the exhibit before its opening was given a terrific runaround by its promoters when she tried to find out the origin of the bodies. She was told only that most were donated to science, though some were "unclaimed."

Coincidentally, "The Universe Within" opened in San Francisco on March 31, the day Terri Schiavo was officially pronounced dead -- a moment when corpses and our moral obligations about how to treat them were at the center of the news. In retrospect, it's amazing that a giant room full of controversial cadavers slipped under the radar of our culture of life for so long. Especially a room full of corpses like this these -- a flamboyant bunch that cavalierly blur the line between science and pure spectacle. I visited last month and found the whole thing exhilarating, God help me.

Next Page: One dead body rides a bicycle with "Forever" stenciled on its frame

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