Five Masterpieces
Yao Peng
姚朋
Production date
2011
Object Detail
Media
book, text and paper removed and re-formed with glue
Measurements
book 13 x 9.5 x 2.5 cm
paper cube 4 x 4 x 3.5 cm
paper cube 4 x 4 x 3.5 cm
Notes
Five Masterpieces (2011) consists of a small, red, plastic-covered book, a copy of Mao Zedong’s Five Essays on Philosophy, which students are still required to study as an essential Marxist-Leninist text. Using a sharp blade, Yao Peng has carefully sliced out words, phrases and whole sentences, leaving pages full of empty strips and holes. He has then taken the cut-out scraps of paper and made them into paper pulp, glued into the shape of a small cube: Mao’s thoughts are now forever unreadable, rendered utterly meaningless. Yao says his act is deliberately absurd, a recognition that he lives in the social aftermath of this ‘truth that we once worshipped’. Language, of course, is inextricably connected to modern Chinese history and politics: Mao’s development of ‘simplified Chinese’, for example, resulted in people having to learn and unlearn different characters, and language was central to the anti-Rightist campaigns of the 1950s and the Cultural Revolution: one unfortunate slip of the tongue could result in a denunciation that would send you to prison. Today, if you enter a banned phrase into a computer search engine you might find your account has been suspended. Yao Peng’s work is focused on the ways in which language in China remains unstable, mutable, and subject to changing political winds.
Accession number
2011.121