He is the enfant terrible of the German art scene. For decades HA Schult has shocked authorities, art critics and the public at large with his happenings and art events. He has heaped tons of newspapers onto Saint Mark's square in Venice during one memorable night. He let a small airplane crash-dive into a trash dump in New Jersey (the pilot survived). He painted cars to make them look like marble, ocean waves or clouds, hung them on church steeples, let them float on the Rhine or had them flown, suspended from a helicopter, over the Cologne cathedral. He borrowed tanks from the Russian army and used them in front of St. Petersburg's Winter Palace to tear apart huge sparkling letters spelling out the word WAR.

Now Schult has topped his many earlier feats with a show of 1000 life sized sculptures on the venerable Great Wall of China. The man-shaped sculptures were produced in Germany from high tech scrap metal and plastic trash; each and every one a different personality. First the garbage army was shown in the Roman amphitheater in Xanten, then in Paris at the arch of La Défense and later on the Red Square in Moscow. Now the "Trash People" were shipped to China by boat, trucked to the town of Jinshanling and carried on the shoulders of 100 men up onto the historic wall. There they were lined up in rows of two, stretching for over one mile up and down the hills. In a way this modern day trash army is an echo of the famous clay army of the first Chinese Emperor and a reminder that "today much of our civilization comes from trash and will become trash", as HA Schult points out. The trash people will continue their travels around the world - to Brazil, Australia, New York….

For more information visit the web site http://www.great-wall-people.com/home.html Photos by Thomas Hoepker of other HA Schult events are also available from Magnum Photos.