Word: mao
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...video that accompanies his Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan, Liu Chenhua explains that he started painting pictures of Mao when he was a child "because I have always had deep feelings for him." Those sentiments come through in his depiction of Mao as a handsome young scholar standing on a mountaintop under swiftly moving clouds. With Jiang Qing's endorsement, it became a "model artwork" and was reproduced more than 900 million times. In the video, Liu explains that a group of printers came to him apologizing that his given name, Chenghua, had been misspelled as Chenhua on the first...
...Though they were produced in murderous times, the works at the Asia Society are almost uniformly cheery, following the dictum of Jiang Qing, Mao's fourth wife and ultimate cultural arbiter, that art be "red, bright and shining." In other words: propaganda. Asia Society Museum Director Melissa Chiu and co-curator Zheng Shengtian argue in the show's excellent catalog, however, that, didactic or not, socialist art represented a "significant cultural movement in China" - one that produced some "truly great art," especially paintings, and that such works "continue to influence Chinese visual culture." The contemporary installation artist Xu Bing, whose...
...Aside from a group of identical stainless-steel sculptures of Mao, created by Qu Guangci in 2003, the exhibition displays no contemporary works, nor does it attempt to explain the link between the paintings and posters on view and the current Chinese art scene that draws so much from them. The label accompanying Chen Yifei's 1972 painting of a single sentry in a monumental landscape, Eulogy of the Yellow River, fails to note that Chen became one of China's most commercially successful artists before his 2005 death...
...connections are striking. You can't look at the black, red and white poster Resolutely Adhere to Execute the July 3rd and July 23rd Proclamations (artist unknown) without wondering if contemporary painter Wang Guangyi would add a Rolex or Coca-Cola logo to it. Zeng Fanzhi's 2005 Chairman Mao with Us looks similar to many of the show's large-scale paintings in which the Great Helmsman marches through fields with peasants (Chairman Mao Inspects the Guangdong Countryside by Chen Yanning) or waves benignly in his bathrobe (Strive Forward in Wind and Tides, by Tang Xiaohe, which commemorates...
...Asia Society show has not been without controversy. China's Culture Ministry refused exit papers for several works, suggesting lingering unease about the Cultural Revolution. That sensitivity is not shared by art collectors, however. Some model artworks have sold in Beijing for over $1 million. One wonders what Mao would have made of that...