Qi Zhilong

Qi Zhilong was one of the early post-1989 artists who created “pop” images of Mao. His work was recently featured on the cover of  the catalogue for Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection, a touring museum exhibition which opened in Switzerland, Bern, in June 2005.  The present work comes from a series of three works featured in the Chinese Pop exhibition at Hong Kong’s first international art fair Art Asia ‘92 in December 1992.

"Political Pop" art appeared in China after 1989 and differs from earlier uses of political imagery in itsr cheerful colors and irreverent attitude. This was one of the early works to exploit the mass appeal of the sexy female as a comment on Mao’s ideological machinations.  The color scheme and representational style used to depict the girl in this painting refer to 1930s Shanghai calendar posters, making the present work a harbinger of a major trend in the mid-1990s whereby 1930s popular imagery was re-appropriated by a newly ascendant commercial culture. Representational works from the 1930s have since been analyzed as early artifacts of the Chinese visualization of the modern body. In Qi’s recent works, he has continued to explore the sex appeal of the Chinese beauty in uniform (See Lot 9).