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“Not surprisingly, the most explicit of these “deconstructionist” Mao image manipulations (dubbed the Cynical Realism, or Political Pop, School of painting) were done in exile, where artist did not need to fear reprisal. Some of the most arresting were those of Zhang Hongtu, a painter who had attended the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing before leaving to study in the United States*. After 1989, Zhang produced a series of distorted Mao likenesses that he called the “Chairmen Mao Series.” Included were works depicting the Chairman wearing a headband inscribed with the motto “Serve the People” standing in front of banner-waving student demonstrators in the Square; Mao with his head dissolving into a blur like a television image distorted by bad reception and the caption “Either the east wind prevails over the west wind, or the west wind prevails over the east wind”; a randy-looking Mao ogling the Goddess of Democracy while exclaiming in an overhead speech bubble, “Women!”; and an empty silhouette of Mao’s head with the likeness of Wu’er Kaixi with bullhorn interposed on it. Zhang’s The Last Banquet is a hilarious rendition of the Central Committee done in the manner of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper . The apostles, all outfitted in Mao’s suits, Mao caps, and even Mao faces, sit at a long table arranged with chopsticks, spittoons, ashtrays, and microphones. In 1993, Zhang was just completing another series, a collection of sculptures fabricated out of everything from wire, steel, brick, and concrete, to rice, grass, burlap, and fur to create a sequence of Mao depictions that he called Material Mao . “Before 1989 I had imagined that I could escape China and politics into my own artistic creations,” Zhang, a gray-haired but energetic forty-seven-year-old, told me when I visited his Brooklyn studio. “As I watched those demonstrations on television, however, I found myself feeling Chinese again. My whole attitude began to change, and I no longer felt that I wanted to isolated myself.” Zhang explained that his fascination with Mao’s image grew out of the power the leader had exerted over him as a boy. “When I was growing up Mao was everywhere. He was like a god. After 1989 I found myself wanting to play with that sacred image, to transform it from a god’s face into that of a moved person.” Zhang readily acknowledges the tremendous power that Mao’s image still retains for him, even in America. “When I first cut up a photo of Mao’s face to make a collage, I felt as if I were sinning. Such feelings have made me realize how my work is really an effort to break the psychologically authority that Mao as an image continues to hold over all Chinese. For me, working on Mao became a form of exorcism.”” *Zhang Hongtu graduated from Central Academy of Arts and Crafts in Beijing in 1964. – Quoted from Mandate of Heaven by Orville Schell, Simon & Schuster,1994 p290-291 |