“If I hadn’t lived in China, hadn’t lived through the cultural revolution, if I had a different family background, if I had moved to Taiwan before 1949, then I would be a very different artist… but my life as a Chinese person, especially after the Democracy Movement, has influence me strongly to think about history, about authority, about culture and to doubt the authority of the image.”
Zhang Hongtu in interview with Jonathan Hay, 1994

The Cultural Revolution was a decade of violence and uncertainty that affected artists’ work for years. Exposing all perspectives of China’s dark history allowed artists to come to terms with their past and with Mao’s icon. In the post-1970s, art became a form of exorcism, where artists could deconstruct political images, and challenge totalitarianism as a political principle. The artists presented on this site exemplify how personal history can shape an artist’s perspectives.

In the 1980s Chinese avant-garde art came onto the scene. For many artists avant-garde art meant the reemergence and redefinition of Mao’s icon. Three strategies were employed: assimilation, deconstructive strategies and appropriation. These techniques used “aesthetic principles and practices of the Cultural Revolution despite their desire to overcome them”(Koppel-Yang). And only once cultural icons were disbanded could artists freely create new meanings.

The history and proliferation of Mao’s image played an important role in how avant-garde artists deconstructed his icon. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao portraits were mass-produced. The standardized image of Mao penetrated the lives of every citizen, transforming him from a mere portrait to an ideological signifier. Situated in the center of Tiananmen Square, Mao’s hybrid image of a photograph and painting exhumes the “objectivity of the everyday and the transcendence of the myth.” There, Mao could perform an “ideological surveillance” on the masses (Smith). Through the deconstruction of Mao, artists hoped to free themselves from the overshadowing and overbearing father figure of China.

The Cultural Revolution left an immediate distaste that lingered for decades after. In order to cope with his past, Li Shan employed the image of Mao Zedong and the infusion of sexuality. Like other artists, the constant repetition and deconstruction of Mao’s features represent an appropriation of the artists’ personal history and hints “at the crucial role of Mao’s image in the collective memory of the Chinese people” (Dal Lago). The works of Wang Guangyi and Yu Youhan blur the line between fantasy and reality, past and present. But in a post-Cultural Revolution world the artist has at least the freedom to define Mao as he sees fit.

 

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