Deng and Mao

If you are lucky enough to visit Mao's (pbuh) birthplace in Shaoshan, you will almost certainly visit the Museum of Comrade Mao.

The biggest picture on display when I visited was this one of Mao shaking Deng Xiao Ping's hand - the Great Helmsman and Capitalist Roader weren't exactly mates for life or swimming buddies.

There's a great series of posters featuring scenes from Deng's life over at Stefan Landsberger's site (which also feature the developing city - another great cliche of Chinese art photography).

Chinese Propaganda Posters

Here is an excellent site for Chinese propaganda posters, with posters from Mao's activist Changsha days through to the Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution and beyond - complete with text giving some historical and political background to the images.

Deutsche Borse Winner

Big congratulations to Esko Manniko for winning the Deutsche Borse Prize. A worthy winner!

Chairman Mao

The Ultimate Mao avatar.
picture copyright Colin Pantall

Cliches of Chinese Photography

Xiaolu Guo's first chapter of 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth opens with a picture of Mao - one of the great cliches of Chinese photography (and again, there are few pictures that can't be improved by the addition of a Mao somewhere in the frame).

Mao is more than just a cliche though (as Wung Hu explains here) - his cult of personality was such that he is an icon with a multiple personality - with a whole selection of avatars ranging from the young activist/idealist to the soldier, bringer of independence and beyond. None of his avatars are especially true to the real Mao, the unhygienic old lech so entertainly described by his personal doctor in The Private Life of Chairman Mao or the carelessly callous leader that Philip Short writes about in Mao: A Life.

And of course, having a posting on Mao gives me an excuse to run some Mao pictures of my own. And what could be more fun than that.

Changing face of Chinese Photography

Xiaolu Guo comes from a generation of writers and artists from the 1990s - a period when the work coming out of China (actually it was mostly staying in China back then) was rough, raw, very performance based and confronted aspects like forced abortions, Chinese attitudes to women and state-sponsored oppression head on.


In 2006, Wu Hung, a curator and academic, said, "Art is so dynamic in China everything moves so fast, so art captures this sense of social transformation. Chinese artists make their works very quickly. there is not a sense of perfectionism, so work can be very huge but crudely made which gives it a strange sense of power. It can just be made for a couple of days exhibition, then the artist moves onto something new, so everything has a raw sense of immediacy and energy.

My feeling is this energy won’t last forever. They will slow down and pay more attention to technique. Another factor is the government is starting to sponsor this type of show and as this happens art becomes less underground than it was in the past. It’s good because this get money and access to space, but originally they identified themselves as underground but as they join the government this may be compromised. They are not exactly censored, but they do not express themselves in the same way. It’s very subtle change. Another factor is commercial. this can also change an artist’s outlook. It’s a double edged sword."

Xiaolu Guo - 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

Not only is Xiaolu Guo a wonderful writer, she's also a funny and intelligent speaker. I saw her at the Bath Literature Festival yesterday, talking about A Conscise Chinese English Dictionary for Lovers and her new book, 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth.

The Dictionary is concerned with the detached nature of language, or more specifically the English language, and the way the emotional elements have been abstracted from the language and, as a result, from life. She contrasted this with Chinese, which has characters that represent a definite ideal (Chinese red is not the same as English red was the example she gave). I think the same is the case in English, though, and from Plato through to Kant, Wittgenstein and beyond, in whose philosophies words and concepts have their representational ideals existing in mystery worlds that root our transitory lives and language in some kind of solid and absolute entity.

Indeed! Most interesting was the dilemma of translation of the Dictionary - a book written in "badly written" English (and of course it's well-written "badly-written" English). How can it be translated into Chinese where the badly-writtenness is nearly impossible to translate. The solution is to have both versions in the book - one page English next to one page Chinese. Which makes the book impossibly thick. It's being published in Taiwan next month.

The writer is living in France now and commented that due to the obsessive French protection of their language, the Dictionary would be impossible to write in French, a language that doesn't have the open-ended flexibility that English has ( a flexibility that English speakers across the world accept in such a matter of fact manner).

I haven't read 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth yet (but will soon - my wife has it at the moment) , but it looks beautiful, with each chapter starting with one of Xiaolu's pictures of Beijing in the midst of development - art photography cliche. They're pretty good pictures and they set the scene and create a visual imagery for the reader to follow.