Art and Place: Essays on Art From a Hong Kong Perspective

34. Reframing Mao: Aspects of Recent Chinese Art, Popular Culture and Politics

236 Reframing Mao: Aspects of Recent Chinese Art, Popular Culture and Politics Hong Kong has played an important role in bringing Chinese avant-garde art to a world audience, and many of the works I discuss in this essay were first introduced to the public in an exhibition co-organized by the Hong Kong Arts Centre and Hanart TZ gallery, which took place in early 1993 at the Arts Centre and the City Hall. China's New Art, Post-1989 was later to travel to Australia and London, and received much critical attention. The response from Hong Kong artists was mixed, but the success of the Chinese avant-garde has definitely offered a challenge to local artists. Little work ofa comparable kind has been done here, however, and one reason for this may be the absence ofany shared visual language such as that which was imposed upon China during the Cultural Revolution period. No similarly hegemonic public iconography exists in Hong Kong which artists might play with. The series of portraits of Mao which have been placed on Tiananmen in the period since 1949 are examples of Chinese works in which the influence of European portraiture is seen (fig. 34.1). The medium used for these works itself derives from European art, of course, as does the technique of modelling used to create a sense of threedimensional form in the head. This technique is also visible in the shadows of the lapels, and the shadow cast by the head onto the shoulder. The close-up head-and-shoulders treatment, as well as the rhetoric of realism which the depiction of a mole on the chin invokes, are also features derived from European sources. While acknowledging these fairly obvious debts to European painting, however, we should not forget the possibility that specifically Chinese visual references may be present. Because of their conscious placement in a site of great imperial significance it is not too far-fetched to see these works as in some sense attempting to appropriate the tradition of imperial portraiture, which had Reframing Mao: Aspects of Recent Chinese An, Popular Culture and Politics similarly made use of influences from Western portrairure.1 Albeit for consciollsly and innovarively political purposes, conventional ritual functions of Chinese portrait images are being invoked, preexisting cultural patterns of response mobilized.l Figure 34.1 Portrait of Mao Zedong on Tiananmen, Beijing (April 1993). Photo by the author. 237 Chinese Art: The View From Hong Kong 238 The orientation towards models is a prevalent and venerable one in China, as Donald J. Munro has pointed out. West Zhou bronze inscriptions contain references to emulation of the virtue of ancestors,3 and the following of models was central to Confucian educational practice.4 Chinese communism took up this notion of models and their imitation in a positive fashion, with Mao himself being frequently cited as the pre-eminent example of socialist virtue. Since (as Munro says) there is a long history in China of conceiving the relationship of ruler to ruled in terms of that of father to child,s a connection to the patterns of ancestral piety is not hard to distinguish. This relationship is underlined by the fact that in Mao's China the prominent models, such as the soldier Lei Feng, were often deceased. After the death of Mao, the relationship between his Tiananmen portrait and Chinese funeral and ancestral portraiture practice became more explicit. As Frederic Wakeman notes, soon after the official announcement of Mao's demise an army unit gathered before that (now black-draped) portrait to take a solemn vow. And while Mao's body (lying in state in the Great Hall of the People) was itself a major focus, the mourning services were followed on 18 September 1976 by a mass rally in the Square, attended by a million people. Photographs of the event show them dressed in white, the Chinese mourning colour. Similar rallies were held all over China, with a portrait of Mao again usually serving as a focus.6 The prominent role played by Mao's portrait image in the ideological apparatus of Chinese communism has led to it becoming a focus of attention in more recent avant-garde Chinese art. This art, while it may be taken as deliberately subversive in tone, dates, however, from a period when the status of Mao has already been subject to a great deal of revision. The...