Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader (67 page)

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Authors: Geremie Barme

Tags: #History, #Asia, #China, #Literary Criticism, #Asian, #Chinese, #Political Science, #Political Ideologies, #Communism; Post-Communism & Socialism, #World, #General, #test

BOOK: Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader
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under extreme political pressure. It is a form of irony that takes as its basic strategy an inversion of Maoist language and symbolism.
Some people believe that the use of political images from the Cultural Revolution in contemporary Chinese art is representative of a type of mass cultural memory rather than being simply part of a critique of politics today. The important thing about the artistic use of the image of Mao Zedong in Mainland China, I maintain, is not its political significance, but the way in which the image is manipulated. After all, an image is altered by the very fact that it is incorporated into an artistic work. As Duchamp wrote in 1917: the crux of the matter is that an image, an everyday object, is selected and given both a new name and significance. It is thereby deprived of its original function and reveals a new meaning.
Whether it be Political Pop in art or the widespread reprisals of Mao during the MaoCraze of the early 1990s, what is significant is that Mao has now become a Pop icon in China. This represents a massive shift away from the days when Mao was a solemn and awe-inspiring god. Mao's aura of sanctity has been dissolved by these acts of commercialization and popularization.
For the artist, Political Pop is a creative endeavor, whereas the MaoCraze has been part of a larger trend toward commercialization in China and has lacked the self-conscious dimensions of the artists' work. This is what I mean in the above when I talk of the ''consumption" of socialist ideology in China and in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe before the end of the cold war. It is in this sense that the MaoCraze has been a fitting end to the post-Mao period of the 1980s. Mao made a reappearance at a time when the system of beliefs represented by him were being swept away by a tide of commercialism.
Looking at Political Pop from the perspective of modern art in China since the late 1970s, it is obvious that Pop art is a reaction to a number of earlier trends. The art of the 1980s was the product of China's open door, the impact of Western currents of thought, and the collapse of the Revolutionary Realist culture of the Maoist era. Western modernism provided the basic ideology for the evolution of a new Chinese culture during that decade and the "Modern Art Exhibition" held in Beijing in early 1989 was a retrospective of the work that had appeared during that decade. That exhibition marked the end of a particular stage in the development of contemporary art. More particularly, the shooting incident that occurred during the exhibition revealed not only the political sensitivity of contemporary Chinese art, it also led to the closure of the exhibition and marked (both in symbolic and actual terms) the end of 1980s' art.
4
The resulting expulsion of all those idealistic modern artists from the China Art Gallery, the leading state art

 

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gallery, forced them to go back underground and continue their wandering lives as opponents of official art.
It is this group of artists who had held on to their idealism despite everything, men and women who were hopeful that Western thought could be used to salvage and help rebuild Chinese culture. Now, in the early 1990s they were faced with a new collapse of values. This time they did not respond to their dilemma as they had in the late 1970s. Now many of them rebelled against their earlier heroism, idealism, and the quest for the metaphysical and sublime. They turned instead to the popular and to deconstructionist projects; they developed an interest in Political Pop.
More important, however, was the changing social scene in China that had resulted from the economic Reforms. Artists developed a Pop view of the rapid and confusing commercialization that was going on around them. They turned away from larger (and often vague and obtuse) cultural issues that had previously so occupied their thoughts and confronted social reality with a new and more practical means for self-expression. We should not forget that Chinese reality is suffused with politics. It is this ever-changing political landscape that forces all Chinese, in particular Chinese intellectuals, to adapt their position, consciously or unconsciously, to every modification in the political climate. To be a political chameleon is a rudimentary means of survival. It is part of an internalized habit, what is called "the captive mind."
5
By reprising political images in a new, unorthodox fashion, Political Pop found a nonheroic means for overcoming the predicament of the captive mind. At the same time, Political Pop became an ideal means for reflecting the social ambience of the post-1989 period.
The early 1990s marks the second period in which Pop has made an appearance in contemporary Chinese art. Following the 1985 exhibition of Robert Rauschenberg's work in Beijing, a fad for Pop swept the Chinese art scene. Artists were particularly interested in Rauschenberg's use of salvaged/found objects. This allowed them to escape for the first time from the easel and make an all-out assault on the accepted Chinese aesthetic.
The introduction of Pop on Mainland China led interestingly to a Dadatype artistic movement.
6
Although Pop art was a continuation of Dada art it was also the product of a highly commercialized environment. The attitudes of the artists engaging in Pop art were necessarily vastly different from those of the post-World War I Dadaists. In the mid 1980s in China, younger artists thought of themselves as revolutionaries united by a desire to overthrow the aesthetic and linguistic conventions of Chinese art. They were interested in how manufactured or found objects could have an impact on two-dimensional art. Dada had used objects to rebel against the aesthetic norms of the past, it is not surprising, then, that Chinese artists accepted the

 

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Dadaist aspects of Pop art while generally ignoring its possibilities as a form of mass or popular art.
Five years later, in 1989, the modern art movement in China was repressed by the authorities while economic Reforms continued apace along with the wholesale commercialization of Chinese society. The mass, vulgar, and indeterminate aspects of commercialization had a particular influence on Chinese artists and they naturally came to utilize the language of Pop. In the context of the history of recent Chinese art, the "misreading" of Pop art in 1985 as a form of Dada had a revolutionary significance in China that fueled the trend toward Political Pop in the early 1990s.
In terms of modern art, China's Political Pop has been deeply influenced by American Pop, in particular the work of Andy Warhol. The differences between the two, however, are that Pop strengthens, even sanctifies popular icons, while Political Pop converts sacred political icons into Pop images. Where American Pop utilized recognized commercial and other icons, Political Pop draws more on the collective cultural memory, in particular those images that are most representative of the revolutionary age like Lenin, Mao, the symbols of the Communist Party, the red star, and so on, mixing these images with contemporary Pop icons.
This is evident, for example, in Alexander Kosolapov's "Lenin Coca Cola," or Wang Guangyi's "Great Denunciation Series," which combines the Cultural Revolution icons of the Worker, Peasant, and Soldier with commercial symbols such as Coca Cola. Similarly, Zhang Peili's "The Beauty Contest" combines the fireworks of the revolutionary past with the image of body building competitions. The Shanghai artist Yu Youhan has juxtaposed Mao with Whitney Houston, while Qi Zhilong has secreted Mao's image in a color photograph of contemporary stars. A more humorous interpretation of the Mao era is Feng Mengbo's "Endgame,'' where the artist has inserted characters from the Revolutionary Model Operas into a video game scenario, while Geng Jianyi's "Forever Effulgent" replaces the image of Mao familiar from Cultural Revolution propaganda iconography with the Panda and images taken from Chinese money.
7
Other artists who have engaged in Political Pop create similar substitutions, juxtapositions, or collages. This genre, as in other (now former) socialist countries, is the product of a socialist cultural environment. The erratic nature of social development has meant that a range of cultures and mentalities coexist in the same space and time: the Cultural Revolution, post-Cultural Revolution, peasant society culture, and even postindustrial culture comingle in the China of today. Added to this is the general decay of values, and all these elements combine to create a confusion of cultural memory(ies) and their interrelationship. Tumbled together in the tidal wave

 

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of commodification, political fixations are deconstructed in a general mood of "instant consumption."
American Pop converted vulgar icons into something more elevated or highbrow, revealing an underlying seriousness in this style of art. In China, the sacrosanct has been vulgarized, epitomizing an attitude that is both playful and humorous.
Note
1. Quoted in Barmé and Jaivin, eds.,
New Ghosts, Old Dreams,
p. xxvi.
2. See Barmé, "Export, Exploit, Expropriate: Artful Marketing from China, 1989-93," in Doran,
China's New Art, post-1989,
p. L.
3. For illustrations of these works, see Li's original article in
Art and AsiaPacific.
4. See note 4 in "A Typology of the MaoCraze" above.
5. In Chinese
xinyu,
literally "the imprisoned heart." "The captive mind" is, of course, Milosz Czeslaw's term.
6. Such as the "Amoy Dadaist" (
Xiamen dadazhuyi
) movement led by Huang Yongping in the mid 1980s.
7. The Chinese titles of these paintings are
Da pipan, Jianmei, Youxi jiesu
and
Yongfang guangmang
respectively. See Doran,
China's New Art, post-1989,
for illustrations of the work mentioned here.

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