Celebrity 48
Zhu Fadong
朱发东
Production date
2008
Object Detail
Media
ink on parchment
Measurements
100 x 80 cm
Notes
Painstakingly applying blue ink to parchment in tiny, pixel-like dots, dashes and stippling, Zhu Fadong has represented the familiar silhouette of Mao Zedong’s head. His work references not only the millions of propaganda posters and illustrations disseminated throughout China for 30 years, but also the image made familiar by Andy Warhol’s Pop Art screen-prints and the subversive and satirical ‘portraits’ of the Chairman produced by Chinese artists of the Political Pop movement of the late twentieth and early twentieth centuries, such as Yu Youhan and Li Shan. Zhu’s portrait is filled with logos referencing the dramatic change in Chinese society wrought by the post-Mao Reform and Opening policies of his successor, Deng Xiaoping, which opened China to global markets. Foreign brands and foreign ideas flooded into China and things would never be the same again. Zhu uses not just the obvious – automobile manufacturers, Visa, Walmart, Coca-cola and Nestlé – in his plethora of multinational corporate signs and symbols: brand names such as Canon, Leica, Nikon, Panasonic and Sony allude to the weakened power of the state’s propaganda apparatus in the era of the digital photograph and the accessible video. Made in 2008, the year of the Beijing Olympics, the work pre-dates the tightening control exercised by the Chinese government over the internet, and the banning of Google, Youtube and social media such as Facebook and Instagram. The red sign like a military medal on Mao’s jacket is the Chinese Coca-cola logo. In Mandarin it’s pronounced ‘Ke-kou Ke-le’ and fortuitously it means (roughly) ‘Delicious Happiness’. The title of Zhu’s work, ‘Celebrity 48’ suggests that the leader of New China, who steered his nation for 30 years until his death in 1976, and whose image looms over Tiananmen Square, is just another ephemeral essentially faceless celebrity.
Accession number
2009.068