Portraits of Tiananmen

In a famous scene in Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 classic To Be or Not to Be (about a Polish acting troop during the period of Nazi occupation), the director of the embedded play (“Gestapo”) complains that the actor playing Hitler does not resemble the Fuhrer, and instead is "just a man with a little moustache." The director, casting about for a model to illustrate what he is looking for, sees a photograph on the wall and exclaims, “That’s it, that’s what Hitler looks like,” to which the actor replies, “That’s a picture of me.”

This notion of a picture or portrait possessing a mysterious, ineffable quality potentially transcending that of the ostensible subject, is also evoked in Don Delillo’s 1991 novel, which remarks at one point: “Mao Zedong. She liked that name all right. But it is funny how a picture. It is funny how a picture what?”

Indeed, it is funny how a picture what? This question is particularly relevant to us today, on the seventeenth anniversary of the June fourth crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protesters in 1989, and also the thirtieth anniversary (to the year, not the day) of the death of Chairman Mao—whose larger-than-life portrait in Tiananmen Square gazed placidly, during that tumultuous period in the late spring of 1989, at the mass of humanity assembled below.

Such was the power of that portrait that even many of the protesters themselves looked askance at the three Hunannees who, on May 23rd of that year hurled eggs filled with red paint at the painting. The protest leaders themselves handed the three over to the national security police while the larger protest was still on-going, and the three subsequently spent a collective 40 years behind bars (the last of the three, Yu Dongyue, was finally released this past February, after reportedly suffering a mental collapse from years of torture and solitary confinement). As Lu Dechang, another of the three protesters, observed in a recent interview,

I think that what the three of us did back in 1989 showed the Party’s authoritarianism, its totalitarianism, most clearly. And they hated us three more than any of the others for it. To this day, they haven’t left us alone.

Part of what was at stake in this act was the desecration of an almost sacrosanct national symbol, but more concretely the political vandals’ action was shocking precisely because constituted a reminder of the inherent materiality and constructivity of the portrait itself.

Just as body doubles in American cinema, as Ann Chisholm observed in Camera Obscura a few years ago, “are constitutive of pivotal plot points in many films” but nevertheless “often do not receive screen credit for their work and are asked to sign contracts agreeing not to reveal their part in the production of cinematic illusion,” similarly the giant portrait of Chairman Mao in Tiananmen Square has become, as Wu Hung argues in Remaking Beijing, “a primary symbol of the nation and the party,” although the portrait itself has been

surrounded by a strange silence: until recently there was little, if any, published record and discussion about its creation and variations, and the painters’ names were kept largely unknown even in artistic circles…. The anonymity of the painters means the autonomy of the painting: it no longer seems a work created by a particular human hand, but an image that is always there and changes on its own.

Over the past decade, however, much has been learned about the identities of these official portraitists, and we now know, for instance, that, while between 1949 and 1952 the Party experimented with a number of different versions of Mao’s portrait for the Tiananmen location, in 1952 they finally picked one of Mao staring straight ahead as the iconic model for all the variants that would follow. The painter of this 1952 version was Zhang Zhenshi, who was then kept on for another decade as the official Tiananmen portrait painter—periodically touching up the portrait under a cloak of anonymity.

Due to the Party’s longstanding interest in erasing the creative hand behind the Tiananmen Mao portrait, therefore, the announcement a few weeks ago that a Mao portrait (a small-scale version of the Tiananmen one) by none other than Zhang Zhenshi would be put up for auction yesterday, June 3rd, was greeted with surprise and, in certain Chinese circles, with fury. As Times reporter David Barboza notes, “After critics on the Internet in China lashed out at the planned sale, Huachen withdrew the item, saying the government had intervened and ‘suggested’ the work be placed in a national museum.”

The very possibility that Zheng’s Mao portrait could be auctioned off to the highest bidder is, in a way, oddly appropriate—symbolizing both China’s gradual transition from Maoist socialism to a modified capitalism, as well as the evolution Mao’s image from political talisman to a combination of commodity and kitsch. As Geremie Barme discusses in Shades of Mao, in recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in Maoist imagery and iconography, with examples ranging from the ubiquitous Mao portraits used as rear-view mirror ornaments in Chinese taxis, to New York fashion designer Vivianne Tam’s line of dressing designed around Zhang Hongtu’s Mao parodies (e.g., Mao as a little girl in pigtails, etc.), to the politically provocative Mao paintings (e.g., Mao bathing in a sea of blood, etc.), which the authorities quietly ordered removed from Beijing art galleries several weeks ago, to the Gao Brothers' series of photographs of the Tiananmen portrait (reproduced below), wherein they get closer and closer to the painting until finally shooting it from almost directly underneath.  Perhaps the most famous of these riffs on Mao’s image, however, is a comparatively early one: Andy Warhol’s famous 1970s series of silk-screened Mao images, which are now so well-known that they have virtually supplanted the original portrait in the (American) popular imagination (much the same way that the portrait itself has, to a certain extent, supplanted Mao “himself”).

The proposed auctioning of Zheng’s Mao portrait on the literal eve of the annual anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown, together with the release back in February of the third and last of the protesters charged with defacing Mao’s Tiananmen Square portrait, help bring into perspective the significance of portraiture, not only as it pertains to Mao himself, but equally importantly as it pertains to the 1989 protests. Just as Mao’s significance is subsumed within his physical portrait, similarly the legacy of the Tiananmen protests is frequently reduced to the single image of the lone, anonymous protester standing resolutely in front of a row of tanks. However, if the trajectory of Mao’s image in recent years illustrates the degree to which images can come to assume a life of their own, independent of official attempts to constrain them, the legacy of the iconic image of the lone protester arguably illustrates the opposite phenomenon: the way in which an image, even of an anonymous subject, can serve as a figurative anchor point, providing an inherently messy and complex event with an (artificial) ideological coherence.
(Cross-posted at Printculture)