As America celebrates its Independence Day, a story from the UK, cleverly headlined ‘sculptural revolution’, shows somewhat less appreciation for historical reality:
Extremely odd things are happening among the trees of the Cass Sculpture Foundation, where a giant monochrome bust of Mao Zedong has been transplanted into west Sussex woodland, with “feckless” youths congregating under it listening to loud hip-hop. Elsewhere, there are plug sockets in the trees and a beautiful view of the South Downs has been blocked by a mosaic wall which could be from a Beijing zoo enclosure. These peculiar sculptures are not unexpected, however, as they are all part of the first major UK exhibition of outdoor work by Chinese artists. The show, A Beautiful Disorder, has newly commissioned works by 18 Chinese artists who spent time at the foundation, responding to the Sussex countryside….
Song Ta installed the giant 3,000kg fibreglass head of Mao, transported from the artist’s home city of Guangzhou via Portsmouth and the M3. It is on a 17m by 9m brick plinth and the young performers sprayed grey and hanging out beneath it are not feckless youths, but members of the Chichester festival youth theatre.
The Mao is not the Mao we immediately imagine either. “He’s quite a romantic-looking figure,” said curator Wendy Teo. “He’s got very lustrous hair and is chiselled and is rather beautiful. There’s an element of playfulness in the way he [Song Ta] is approaching Chinese politics and history.”
Here’s an extract from The Tragedy of Liberation, Frank Dikötter’s history of the early years of Mao’s rule:
Mao emphasized that the terror should be ‘stable’ (wen), ‘precise’ (zhun) and ‘ruthless’ (hen): the campaign should be carried out with surgical precision, without any slippage into random slaughter, which would undermine the standing of the party. ‘But before anything else, the term “ruthless” has to be emphasized’. Perusing the reports he was handed…he nudged the country further: ‘In provinces where few have been killed a large batch should be killed; the killings can absolutely not be allowed to stop too early.’
Playfulness, indeed.
Playing with History