Fifth-Round Thinking About Bananas and Their Rights - Tell a Smartass Chicken Joke to the Party
Liao Guohe
廖国核
Production date
2011
Object Detail
Media
acrylic on canvas
Measurements
206 x 237.5 cm
Notes
Fifth-Round Thinking About Bananas and Their Rights – Tell a Smartass Chicken Joke to the Party (2011) features a shadowy authority figure with a penis-like nose, carrying a phallic banana at crotch level. With scrawled, slogan-like text (sometimes described as ‘cacography’ in comparison to the beauty of calligraphy) and quickly scribbled figures, his paintings appear to owe a debt to street graffiti and cartoon characters, but, in fact, they follow the dictum of an artist/poet of the thirteenth century, Zhao Mengfu: ‘Calligraphy and painting are essentially the same thing.’ Historically, China is often described as a ‘culture of the word’: the great ink painters wrote poetry on scrolls that depicted subjects such as bamboo, mountains, rocks and twisted trees with the same kind of brushmarks used for their calligraphy. Instead of the ordered and hierarchical world of the literati, though, Liao’s slapdash texts and scrawled images represent a contemporary world characterized by avarice, widespread corruption, internet mockery, heavy-handed censorship, and the overwhelming cynicism of the populace at large.
Accession number
2012.060