MCLC: Warhol's Mao works censored in China

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Sean Macdonald <smacdon2005 at gmail.com>
Subject: Warhol’s Mao works censored in China
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As a follow up to Duchamp, it seems like all the avant-garde is showing
up. The Global Times article is worth a read, just for the Warhol quote
from his visit in 1981. He liked the "blue jackets" it seems. Warhol was
probably reproducing a current "American" image. Of course, the repetition
of the image of Mao  was hardly Warhol's invention. Warhol invented very
little, but he liked to add color. I have always thought hand-colored
photography wasn't unknown in political portraiture in the PRC.

Sean

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Source: Wall Street Journal Blog (3/25/13):
http://blogs.wsj.com/scene/2013/03/25/warhols-mao-works-censored-in-china/

Warhol’s Mao Works Censored in ChinaBy Doug Miens

Mao Zedong’s face has long graced trinkets and kitsch sold at tourist
markets across China. But in the country’s top art museums, his most
famous portrayal by a Westerner isn’t welcome.

Sorry, Andy Warhol.

Although the scion of Pop Art passed away in 1987, Warhol is still
generating controversy. A vast traveling retrospective of his work, “Andy
Warhol: 15 Minutes Eternal,” has already made stops in Singapore and Hong
Kong as part of a two-year Asia tour, but when it moves to mainland China
next month, the artist’s Mao paintings won’t be coming along.

Organized by the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the full exhibition
consists of hundreds of Warhol’s best-known artworks, including eight
silkscreen paintings of Mao. The museum declined to state where the Mao
paintings would be kept while the show is on display in Shanghai and
Beijing, its two China stops.

“We had hoped to include our Mao paintings in the exhibition to show
Warhol’s keen interest in Chinese culture,” said Andy Warhol Museum
director Eric Shiner in a statement. He added, “We understand that certain
imagery is still not able to be shown in China and we respect our host
institutions’ decisions.”

The museum’s staff declined to confirm the exhibition’s dates and venues
for Shanghai and Beijing. Its website
<http://blogs.wsj.com/scene/2013/03/25/warhols-mao-works-censored-in-china/
tab/print/www.warhol.org/exhibitions/2012/15minuteseternal/> currently
says “check back for details” on the show for both cities.

Nonetheless, over the weekend Shanghai’s Power Station of Art
<http://www.powerstationofart.org/en/>, China’s first state-owned gallery
dedicated to contemporary art, posted on its website that it would host
“15 Minutes Eternal” from April 29 to July 28 with free entry. The
Shanghai institution did not reply to requests for comment.
In an op-ed last month, the English-language edition of the state-owned
Global Times 
<http://www.globaltimes.cn/NEWS/tabid/99/ID/760814/760814.aspx> tabloid
said that Warhol’s Mao paintings pushed the boundaries of cultural
acceptability. According to the author, color painted or splotched on
Mao’s face could appear like cosmetics — a disrespectful treatment of the
Chairman’s face.

Art and controversy are common bedfellows in China. Pop Art was a major
influence for China’s contemporary artists in the 1980s and ’90s, among
them Ai Weiwei, whose persistent documentation of everyday life once
earned him the nickname “the Chinese Andy Warhol
<http://www.sampsoniaway.org/blog/2011/04/21/detained-chinese-artist-ai-wei
wei%E2%80%99s-visit-to-the-warhol-museum-uncertain/>.” The artist’s
detention by Chinese authorities in April 2011 prevented him from visiting
the Warhol Museum one month later.

In the Hong Kong edition of “15 Minutes Eternal,” on view through April 1,
the public appeared to respond well to the Mao paintings, which were
displayed with a Mao print from the museum’s permanent collection.