- 8
Li Shan
Description
- Shan Li
- Rouge No. 59: The Young Mao
- signed in Chinese and English and dated Munanshan 1994 Shanghai
- oil on canvas
- 43 1/2 by 65 1/4 in. 110.5 by 165.7 cm
Provenance
Acquired by the present owner from the above
Exhibited
22nd International Biennial of São Paulo, The Remaking of Mass Culture, October - December 1994, p. 20, illustrated in color
Catalogue Note
Li Shan was trained as a set designer at the Shanghai Drama Academy in the 1960s. He was born in 1942, more than a decade before any of the artists who would later become his peers in the Political Pop movement such as Wang Guangyi and Zhang Xiaogang. Li’s Rouge series, begun in October 1989, first won him international recognition.
For Li, the violent end of the June 4th Movement meant a decision to “give up” and “release” the historical burden of Maoism. In the Rouge paintings, executed between 1989 and 1996, Li appropriates Mao and feminizes him with operatic and primitive make-up applied in a silly and superficial manner. In the present work, Li deliberately “rouges” Mao's lips and his face and gives the Great Helmsman eyeshadow and wispy eyebrows. The basic Mao image at the core of the work comes directly from popular Cultural Revolution posters; the rouge is associated with Chinese New Year folk prints. Though the coloring is artificial, vulgar and humiliating, Li manages, by using detailed airbrush technique, to paint a polished Mao, whimsical and delightful. Li explains: "If we make 'rouge' a verb, and wish 'to rouge' something away, this is not so much a matter of will and method, as a question of attitude. There is a warning here: there is no integral relationship between Art on the one hand and works of art and artists on the other. Art has nothing to do with critics, agents, museums, collectors, the viewing public or the media. And once Art itself becomes an object of attention, it becomes a shoddy, vulgar copy of itself, which everyone is capable of possessing."
Although Li’s statement might best apply to the way in which Political Pop art was later appropriated by the global media as a stand-in for China’s political situation in the 1990s, the present work, dating to the crest of this influential wave in 1994, successfully captures the energy of a volatile and historic moment.