The first slide showed four executed men lying in bloodstained snow, with plastic bags tied around their heads and their hands bound behind them. The crowd at the University of Cincinnati's Tangeman Center was so quiet you could hear a jaw drop.
The next slides showed two people in white lab coats stripping the bodies, then hosing them down. The last one showed the naked body of a young man on an autopsy table in a lab, with a hole drilled in his face.
"You see the hole next to his nose? They are ready to plastinate," said Harry Wu.
 "This is not an automotive show, not a computer show, not a furniture show. These are human beings," he said in his soft-spoken, slightly fractured English. "This is good knowledge for you to know."
Wu was talking about "Bodies ... The Exhibition," which has sold 150,000 tickets ($11 to $23 each) at the Cincinnati Museum Center. The knowledge he wants us to know is that the skinned corpses displayed in entertaining poses at the Museum Center were real people - who may have been executed in Chinese prisons.
"This is only a small part," he said. "I could show you a lot."
He did. Starting with his own amazing story.
Wu knows a side of China we won't see in any Olympic moments - as dark as solitary confinement; as ugly as the muddy fields where prisoners are shot through the heart while crews stand by with scalpels to harvest organs before the corpse cools.
Wu was a student in 1960 when he was arrested. "I was a capitalist and a Catholic," he said. "I spoke my mind." Strike three.
He got no trial, no hearing. For 19 years he was a slave laborer in the Laogai - "labor reform" in English, and "gulag" in any language.
When he got out in 1979, he found out his father had been arrested, tortured and killed. His mother had committed suicide. His brother renounced the family to save himself, but was arrested, tortured and killed.
Wu survived beatings, torture, broken bones, starvation and despair so wrenching he cried for two years and tried to find the will to kill himself. "I exist as a beast," he said.
He came to America with $40 in his pocket, and walked the streets of San Francisco at night, with no place to sleep. But he kissed the ground. "I was a free man. I was happy. Whatever happen to me much better than life in the labor camps."
Yet his heart told him, "Before you die, you have to do something for the people."
He began to speak out again. He testified in Congress about the Laogai. China releases no information about executions, not even to families, he said. But one document showed 24,000 in 11 months.
Wu talked about the rubber boots, shoes and paper clips we buy, made by prison labor. He said China is second in the world for harvesting organs, "but 95 percent of the organs are from executed prisoners."
He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his courage. Repeatedly, he risked his life by going back to China to document labor camps, executions and other human rights abuses - including plastination of bodies for exhibits like the one in Cincinnati.
In 1995, Wu was arrested again in China, accused of "stealing state secrets." Pressure from the U.S. pried him loose 66 days later. "Am I a terrorist?" he asked. "Am I a bank robber? A rapist?"
No. To the Communists he was a bigger threat: a man with the courage to speak up.
He still does. "In China, the prison camp is a profit center," he said.
And so is the "Bodies" exhibit.
Wu toured the show the day he spoke at UC. "Today I feel very depressed because they are native Chinese," he said.
Museum Center officials said they chose the most ethical exhibit. But it's actually one of the few that has no consent for any of the bodies and no certainty about their origin.
"I'm not going to say that all these in Cincinnati are executed prisoners," Wu said. "Maybe only one or two. Maybe none."
But it's clear that hundreds of executed prisoners were sold to plastination labs for $30 each, he said. "Join together," he urged. "Protest the exhibition. Don't let your children go."
"Let's say all are Jewish, black, Mexican. What do you think? Kind of racism there?" he asked. "I am kind of disappointed the people are not responding to that. But I realize money is very important. The exhibit makes money. It is wrong, but today money dominates the truth."
The bodies in the bloodstained snow don't lie. If they could, they might ask: How can executions be shocking - if corpses are entertainment?
Peter Bronson is a columnist for The Enquirer. E-mail pbronson@enquirer.com or call 513-768-8301.
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