Category Archives: Museums

An Artistic Prelude to Real Horror

Art does not exist solely to make people happy. It’s there to evoke emotion, and by doing that, make people think.  This is definitely the case with the statues outside the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Museum.  There, a series of sculptures help set a somber and sobering tone before a visitor even steps onto the premises. This is especially effective if a visitor comes on a busy national travel day. The line can be long to get in, and a visitor is forced to stare at these metal figures and the bilingual captions that came with them. That said, even though it does the proper mood, nothing can actually prepares you for the horror of historical relics and displays of the Japanese slaughtering 300,000 people.