All Hail the Chairman

Inconspicuously designed, the façade of The Asia Society and Museum blended in with the rest of 70th street. With its revolving door and collected gatherers sitting around the “PRIVATE EVENT” area consuming Western food and sipping fine wine, I thought perhaps I had entered the wrong building. Upon presenting my Cultural Passport, I was given a circular token with a lion’s white silhouette resting against a dark blue background (not exactly the crimson Commie red I had been hoping for). Ascending the stairs in hopes of exploring the Eastern arts that I had never seen up close, I noticed a painting of several gleeful Chinese men (each modeled after the painter) sitting in a bowl who insisted that I would not be disappointed.

On the second floor was an exhibit of Mao Zedong. One of the galleries featured the decadence and reemergence of Chinese art and the memorabilia left over from Mao’s reign. Like a cult of personality, statues of Mao and pictures of his face adorned the small, but culturally rich room. Within this box of a room was another box, which contained everything from copies of Mao’s Little Red Book (among which there was a blasphemous blue covered copy) to an elegantly aged vase whose sides were inhabited by a feudal lord lashing his servant. Fencing the walls of the room was the chronology of the Mao’s reign from 1939 to 1979 with red text noting the artistic and cultural changes, and black text expounding on the changes in the political climate. Above each year was a single image embodying that year’s significance such as the photograph of Nixon’s visit to China in ’72 or the painting of the rally at Tiananmen Square in ’76.

A separate gallery housed works associated with the perception of Mao rather than the historical context. Greeting the entrance was a majestic painting of Mao, standing amongst a group of farmers, staring upward into a clear sky. It is a scene from the countryside with lush green endlessly spanning and escaping the frame.  On the right of the background is a train traveling towards the viewer, releasing a long trail of smog that represents industrialization and calls to attention the strong contrast between the new China and the old farming culture. Although many intricate and masterful portraits of Mao scattered the gallery, the piece that I gauged my attention on was a scene of lord and servant statues. Lunging at his lord, one of the servants bore an expression that encapsulated the desperation of serfs everywhere before Mao’s rise to power.

Though he is of impressive size, the servant’s jerked posture tells a story of a universally shared struggle. The life-sized statue wears a body of copper, though turned green by time. His eyes pierce the viewer, as if he were capable of springing to life at any moment. Despite the large muscles flowing and cutting through his body, his paper-thin skin fails to shelter his ribs from protruding outward. The old lord reclines in his chair, sinking into the comfortable embrace of the bamboo. Feet rested on a table, his face bears no emotion despite his apparently imminent death. The lord is a representation of the old system – “proof by contradiction” per se – serving as evidence of Mao’s greatness through contrast to the cruel hands of man.

Though the convoluted history of China has distorted the public perception of Mao, there is much to learn about both the culture and the social climate of China from these galleries. In my life, I’ve seen both the lush green overwhelming the peripheral, as well as technology infringing on nature for the sake of economic growth. Although the exhibit was a visually enriching experience, it transcends simple aesthetic value by providing insight into the political and economical landscapes of Mao’s era.