What
Yao Peng
姚朋
Production date
2011
Object Detail
Media
oil on card
Measurements
25 pieces, dimensions variable
Notes
For a series of painted postage stamps, What (2011), Yao Peng created an absurdist display of Communist Party imagery, both real and fake: Mao points in different directions; Richard Nixon glares; performers dance the revolutionary ballet, Red Detachment of Women; and Cultural Revolution propaganda posters are re-painted as tiny ‘shadow’ images of the bright, enticing originals. The design of postage stamps is one way a nation state identifies itself to the world, promoting self-aggrandising aspects of its history and culture, and constructing an acceptable version of its national character. Postage stamps trumpet scientific breakthroughs, industrial successes, cultural achievements, sporting victories and unabashed political propaganda. Yao Peng’s miniature oil paintings could indeed be copies of actual Chinese stamps – and sometimes they are – but you soon realise there is something amiss: he subverts the official ‘serious’ history conveyed by such images, and instead renders them as absurdly comical. Yao Peng says, ‘People assume that stamps are real and official,’ but instead, he has created a parallel reality and an alternative truth.
Some of Yao’s painted stamps are simply preposterous, in fact, including a series depicting classical Chinese boudoir paintings that are far too graphic to appear on an actual postage stamp. Another shows a cordial meeting that never took place between Hu Jintao and the Dalai Lama. Others are copies of actual stamps, such as the much-reproduced image of the ballerina ‘en pointe’ from Red Detachment of Women; it is copied from a 1972 stamp series commemorating the 30th Anniversary of Publication of Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art, where Mao made his famous declaration that art must ‘serve the people’. The ballet tells the story of a peasant girl who overcomes all odds to become a revolutionary hero. Yao Peng’s deliberately awkward hand-painted version emphasises the ludicrous quality of this propaganda ballet, first staged only a few years after Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the resulting famine that is now believed to have caused the deaths of forty million people. Others are copied from another of Madame Mao’s revolutionary ballets, The White-Haired Girl, which was adapted from an opera said to have moved Mao to tears when it was first performed. Yao Peng challenges his audience to separate real from fake; he asks us: What is reality, anyway, if it can be so easily co-opted for political ends?
Some of Yao’s painted stamps are simply preposterous, in fact, including a series depicting classical Chinese boudoir paintings that are far too graphic to appear on an actual postage stamp. Another shows a cordial meeting that never took place between Hu Jintao and the Dalai Lama. Others are copies of actual stamps, such as the much-reproduced image of the ballerina ‘en pointe’ from Red Detachment of Women; it is copied from a 1972 stamp series commemorating the 30th Anniversary of Publication of Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art, where Mao made his famous declaration that art must ‘serve the people’. The ballet tells the story of a peasant girl who overcomes all odds to become a revolutionary hero. Yao Peng’s deliberately awkward hand-painted version emphasises the ludicrous quality of this propaganda ballet, first staged only a few years after Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the resulting famine that is now believed to have caused the deaths of forty million people. Others are copied from another of Madame Mao’s revolutionary ballets, The White-Haired Girl, which was adapted from an opera said to have moved Mao to tears when it was first performed. Yao Peng challenges his audience to separate real from fake; he asks us: What is reality, anyway, if it can be so easily co-opted for political ends?
Accession number
2011.119