Saturday, October 11, 2008

The Cultural Revolution


Shi Xinning
Duchamp Retrospective Exhibition (2000-2001)

Long after The
Long March,
Mao finds ready-
made refreshment
at the Fountain
of R. Mutt—how
I wish I had
come up with
this ficcione.

My thanks to the wonderful & always informative Vitro Nasu for bringing this to my attention.

& a bit more information.....
"The first of Xinning's Mao paintings, "Duchamp Retrospective Exhibition" (2000-2001), immediately became a classic. It was a triumph of free artistic creation, a vehement challenge to the reduction of art to the propagandist socialist realism that had been practiced for decades, even after Mao's death. In Shi's works Mao is required to be and do what he denied his people; he becomes a dedicated protagonist of political events in the capitalist West, and lounges in a bourgeois manner next to high-society beauties on sofas or in villa gardens."
Excerpt from a text by Ulrike Münter, "Burned into the Collective Memory: Mao Zedong - The presence of the past in the paintings of Shi Xinning".

2 comments:

Ernesto said...

That's an amazing photo.

mark young said...

Not a photo, a genuine painting. See here for some more in the series.