Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader (28 page)

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Authors: Geremie Barme

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BOOK: Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader
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213. Toby Young, "The End of Irony?," p. 6.
214. Barmé, "Soft Porn, Packaged Dissent, and Nationalism," p. 273.

 

Page 68
215. Orville Schell comments on Yu's
The Age of Mao Zedong Series
paintings by saying that they are "centered around silhouettes of Mao outlandishly filled in with chintz and paisley-like patterns as if Laura Ashley had designed a special line in Mao suits." See Schell,
Mandate of Heaven,
pp. 289-90. In conversation with another artist during a trip to New York, Yu Youhan was horrified by any suggestion that his Maos could be used in designing clothes.
216. See Valerie C. Doran, ed.,
China's New Art, post-1989 (with a retrospective from 1979-1989),
pp. 10-17, 76, and 82.
217. For Zhu Wei's work see
Zhu Wei: The Story of Beijing.
The cover of this handsome volume is made from red plastic in the style of Mao's
Quotations.
Plum Blossoms (International), the publisher of the book, also produced a New Year's card using a red pencil sketch of Mao as Santa Claus.
218. The Beijing-based critic Jia Fangzhou calls Zhu's work "the `Red Rock 'n' Roll' of Chinese
gongbi
" painting. See
Zhu Wei,
p. 11. For Zhu's representations of Mao see pp. 51, 73, 85, 95, 101, and 111.
219. See Noth et al., eds.,
China Avant-Garde,
pp. 169 and 175, respectively. In the early-1990s collage "Missing Bamboo," Wu Shanzhuan, creator of "Red Humor" (
Hongse youmo
) in the mid 1980s, replaced Mao's official portrait at a Party congress with the picture of a Panda bear. See Julia F. Andrews and Gao Minglu,
Fragmented Memory: The Chinese Avant-Garde in Exile,
pp. 34-5. While the artist Li Shan created "homo-neurotic" works using Mao's image, during 1992-94, Feng Mengbo, the Beijing "video game artist,'' used Mao and other Party icons in his faux computer-generated paintings. See "Feng Mengbo," in Li Xianting and Shan Fan,
Der Abschied von der Ideologie: Neue Kunst aus China,
pp. 25-27.
220. See Nancy Condee and Vladimir Padunov, "Pair-a-Dice Lost: The Socialist Gamble, Market Determinism, and Compulsory Postmodernism," p. 89.
221. See Don J. Cohn, ed.,
Liu Da Hong, Paintings 1986-92,
pp. 150-59 and 136-39.
222.
Die lian hua
is in the Schoeni Collection, Hong Kong.
223. See Barmé and Jaivin,
New Ghosts, Old Dreams,
pp. xxv-xxvi, 76, 93, 133, 384, 404, and 409. Zhang Hongtu exhibited his Mao
æuvre,
"Material Mao," at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, October 13, 1995-January 14, 1996. See Lydia Yee,
Zhang Hongtu: Material Mao.
One of Zhang's images also was featured on the cover of a collection of contemporary Chinese fiction; see Howard Goldblatt, ed.,
Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused: Fiction from Today's China.
224. Tam and Zhang joined forces as the result of an introduction from Danny Yung (Rong Nianzeng), director of Zuni Icosahedron, a Hong Kong avant-garde theater group. The T-shirts included Ow Mao (Mao with a bee on his nose), Holy Mao (Mao in a cleric's dog collar), Mao So Young (Mao in pigtails with a gingham dress and Peter Pan collar), Miss Mao (Mao with baby pink lipstick), Psycho Mao (Mao with novelty dark glasses), and Sado Mao (a bare-chested Mao). Tam also produced a T-shirt with Mao wearing an AIDS ribbon for the Macy's Passport Fashion Show, a charity benefit for AIDS sufferers in San Francisco in September 1995. Tam's designs were also used by Zuni in their production "2 or 3 Things . . . of No Significance, Hong Kong 1995," which played on a number of Maoist themes and the looming issue of 1997. See Danny Yung, "Zuni Performance Worsening Day by Day," and
Zuni Daily News,
20-21 January 1995.
225. Tam released her line of Mao-wear at a spring fashion show in New York in late 1994. By early 1995, her Mao T-shirts and dresses were available in stores from Hong Kong to the United States. See "Quanshen fa `Mao'"; Charlotte Bevan, "Making a Mint out of Mao";
People,
May 1995; and Victoria Eng, "Vivienne Tam," pp. 52-

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