Death of the Hammer
Wu Junyong
吴俊勇
Production date
2008
Object Detail
Media
oil on canvas
Measurements
40 x 40 cm
Notes
The figure of a man wearing a dunce’s hat recurs throughout Wu Junyong’s animations, prints and paintings. He sometimes agrees that this is an intentional, coded reference to the horrific ‘criticisms’ levelled at intellectuals and others during the Cultural Revolution, and sometimes attributes other meanings to this image. For example, the Chinese expression ‘dai gao maozi’ (to wear a tall hat) implies both making someone the object of insincere flattery and also refers to the gao maozi itself, the tall, cone-shaped paper hat that those deemed anti-revolutionary were forced to wear. Perhaps, he says, both meanings are relevant to a contemporary society that abounds in falsity and back-stabbing. Wu Junyong’s paintings are dark allegories which may be read in multiple different ways. He loves the art of the northern Renaissance, Breugel and Dürer especially, and his view of the world and humanity is similarly bleak. Here we are left to wonder whether the man in his Mao suit and tall cap is shouting in rage or screaming in terror as the suspended hammer comes ever closer.
Accession number
2009.057