The Imprisoned Heart: Consuming Mao

Abstract

Li Xianting is one of a number of rônin art critics. Although he is based in Beijing, he now services the international art world, often acting as a guide to the arcana of China's nonofficial art world. An active writer and critic since the late 1970s, Li has been witness to all the fads and fashions of the Chinese art world. In the early 1990s, he curated a number of major exhibitions of nonofficial art overseas, including soi-disant works of "Political Pop," often featuring the reworking of Mao's image, which flourished as the Communist Party became increasingly mired in its own ideological confusion. In an age when politics past is open to ironical abuse and every hallowed Party icon can be suffocated in air quotes, Political Pop has little significance apart from its value as a commercial trope. As I have written elsewhere: "It is not surprising that much of the cultural iconoclasm that plays with Chinese political symbols tempers its irony with a disturbing measure of validation: by turning orthodoxy on its head the heterodox engage in an act of self-affirmation while staking a claim in a future regime that can incorporate them. On this most sublime level Mao has become a consumer item. "Mao and other dated icons of the militaristic phase of Chinese socialism can now safely be reinvented for popular and elite consumption. Madonna titillates her audiences with naughty evocations of Catholic symbols, ones that are culturally powerful and commercially exploitable. Political parody in China works in a similar fashion. Things might be very different-and dangerous-if Deng Xiaoping was the icon being given the Warhol treatment."