Fairy Tales in Red Times - Pink
Shao Yinong; Muchen;
邵译农; 慕辰;
Production date
2003-2007
Object Detail
Media
hand-coloured photograph
Measurements
160 x 120 cm
Notes
For the series, Fairy Tales in Red Times of 2003-2007, Shao Yinong and Muchen used a nostalgic technique: the hand-colouring favoured by early Chinese photographic studios. Each day, in the morning and afternoon, the artists encountered students from a special needs school close to their Beijing studio. These children, who were vision or hearing impaired, or intellectually disabled, seemed happy and carefree, in contrast to the anxiety and gloom that Shao and Muchen saw in Chinese adults and the spoiled only children of the newly wealthy. They began to consider the relationship between physical and psychological health, and how the traumas of the past lie just below the surface of the present-day, shooting dozens of photographs of the children attending the school, before selecting just six. These were printed on a monumental scale that was intended to evoke the giant portraits of Mao, Lenin and Marx that the artists recall from their own childhoods. Here each photograph is named by colour, referencing the printing process but also emphasising the anonymity of the children; they are individuals, with their own histories, but they also represent the vulnerable and marginalised. Despite the artists’ observations of the real children as cheerful and friendly, they have represented them as poignant. The boy in Fairy Tales in Red Times—Black wear the coveted red scarf of the Young Pioneer Communist youth brigade, another nostalgic signifier for people of the artists’ generation, who experienced ‘High Socialism’.The little freckle-faced girl in her bright fuchsia coloured sweater in Fairy Tales in Red Times—Pink, and the pigtailed girl in Fairy Tales in Red Times—Blue, with her eyes hidden behind her pink-tinted glasses, seem stoically resigned.
Accession number
2015.178