ABSTRACT
The Tank man and Tiananmen Square are two moments of the iconic entailing collective global spectatorship, convening these as symbols of seismic change in the political landscape of China. Tank man as the unknown iconic is a mythic symbol of Tiananmen. As a phantasm appearing and disappearing through the annals of modern history of China, he continues to be a site of fervent imagination and re-articulation of protest, co-locating Tiananmen through its violent past. In the commemoration of Tiananmen demonstrations of 1989, the Tank Man is a recurring spectacle of the iconic events, re-appropriated and celebrated through the vernacular of social media and its architecture of virulence, to be installed as a part of Tiananmen’s collective memory and as a fantasy figure of the West.
