1. Life of the Artist
We’ve achieved nothing remarkable and have fallen far short of what we heroically set out to do when we were young. (Mao Xuhui, Journal at the Palm Camp, 1995)
Mao Xuhui was born on 2 June 1956 in Chongqing in south-western China. Both his parents taught at the Geology School in that city, but in September of the same year, his parents were transferred to Kunming to help build the frontier during the political movement known as the Great Leap Forward. He has described his life there:
The school where my parents worked in Kunming was located in the northern suburbs of the city, against a backdrop of red earth and rocky hills. It was really big, with a reservoir, and there were stretches of reclaimed land on which corn, vegetables and sunflowers were planted by the staff. You could see green melon tendrils reaching out in every direction. The huge sports ground surrounded by grass was where we flew kites. The kindergarten was near the reservoir ringed with dense willow groves. And in summer, the willows were covered with caterpillars, whose color resembled that of bark. It was exciting… (The Path of My Soul: A Brief Autobiography, 1956-1985, 1989)
The state of mind revealed by Mao when he was recalling the surroundings of his childhood is reflected vividly in his Guishan series, but it was his life in the countryside rather than the city which left the artist with a deep and indelible love of nature.
Mao went with his parents to live in the city when he was about eight. Two years later, in 1966, he describes: ‘I was a fourth grader, when I began to experience the Cultural Revolution with tens of millions of my fellow countrymen, daily reciting the three essays of chairman Mao, namely, In Memory of Dr. Bethune, Serve the People and The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountain’. As it was impossible for a ten-year old to rationally understand the unprecedented Cultural Revolution, the printing of red armbands, and the making and distribution of propaganda sheets were just games. If we look closely at the collages made by this artist 20 years later, we can detect the historical traces left by the Cultural Revolution in his works.
After graduation from high school in 1971, Mao was assigned a job in a wholesale goods store in Kunming, working as a laborer, but he was later transferred to manage a warehouse. This job gave him more free time. Other youths working in the warehouse were either literature or music lovers. After reading Letters to Young Students by a Soviet writer borrowed from one of his violin-playing colleagues, Mao began to study painting. Although he often went out sketching in the suburbs after work, he knew nothing about the history of art, and even less about artistic issues. As an oil painter, the start of Mao’s career cannot be compared to that of any of his Western counterparts, because in 1977, the first year he was enrolled in the Department of Fine Arts at Kunming Normal College, he was sent to a suburban county as a member of a work team urging the local peasants to learn from Dazhai, a model agricultural production brigade. It was on this trip that he made friends with Zhang Xiaogang and Ye Yongqing, educated youths then farming with the peasants, but well-known artists today.
Mao later recalled that before he went to college, the strongest influence on him was the natural scenery, alluding both to the year-round temperate climate of Kunming and the fondness for the outdoors of the artists in that city. As Mao described:
All artists from Kunming were fond of painting landscapes that revealed their shared interest in impressionism. This was probably due to the warm spring-like climate in Kunming throughout the year. (The Path of My Soul: A Brief Autobiography, 1956-1985)
As the artist recalls, he was mainly engaged in painting plaster figurines during his first two years at college. The printed materials that he could access were mostly Soviet works, and he worshipped such famous Russian masters as Levitan, Repin and Surikov. But during this period, Wu Guanzhong’s promotion of ‘formal beauty’ (xingshi mei), Yuan Yunsheng’s mural at Beijing’s Capital Airport, and the introduction to early Western art in art magazines began to shatter the beliefs that Mao Xuhui had blindly accepted. One day, a teacher at his college told him that artists like Repin were not usually included in art histories. This statement came as quick a shock to Mao, and led him to ‘shift his enthusiasm from the Russian artists firmly in the direction of impressionism and European art, especially paintings by Van Gogh, Cezanne and Gauguin’.
The inadequate knowledge he acquired at college was everything Mao knew about art, and at that time plaster figures and anatomic sketches became essential guides in his artistic quest. However, in his third year at college, Mao borrowed from the school library Man, Time and Life, the autobiography of the Soviet cultural figure Ilya Ehrenburg (1891-1967). This book provided an introduction to 20th century modern Western artists which abruptly ‘tore my illusions to pieces’. It was at that time that Mao came to realize that art was not necessarily a striving for fidelity or likeness. Ehrenburg’s introductions to Modigliani, Picasso, Leger, Soutine, Rivera, Malevich and others ‘greatly opened my eyes’. Mao was also greatly fascinated by another aspect of the book, namely ‘its account and analysis of the situation of art and literature after the victory of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Apart from establishing a worker-dominated government, the Revolution failed to resolve any ideological issues. Art became a means of propaganda; talented artists were pushed aside or even persecuted. That situation seemed so similar to our own reality!’(The Path of My Soul: A Brief Autobiography, 1956-1985) This concern with reality and human existence not only reflected Mao’s own concerns, but hit on the problem confronted by everyone of his generation. As a result, although Mao expressed his dislike for literary paintings, he acknowledged the value of, and was greatly moved by Snow on an Unrecorded Day in 1968 (1968 nian X yue X ri xue) by Cheng Conglin, a practitioner of what was called at the time Scar Art (Shanghen yishu). The exploration of human nature and the pursuit of truth became the basic concerns of the artists of Mao’s generation. As Mao pondered essential artistic issues, he came to believe that the technique of distinctive line work used by Yuan Yunsheng and Jiang Tiefeng, two artists from Yunnan known for their richly colored and decorative line paintings on Korean paper, and the ‘formal beauty’ stressed by Wu Guanzhong were both shallow and irrelevant. Mao now regarded their works as ‘decorative’ (hen zhuangshi) and ‘superficial’ (hen xiaoqi).
Increased contact with studies of modern Western art and reproductions, as the early 1980s saw China opening its doors to Western art and philosophy, left Mao’s belief in the Soviet education system in tatters by the time of his graduation. Cezanne, whom Mao regarded as ‘the father of modern art’, so fascinated him that he made ‘Paul Cezanne’ the topic of his graduation thesis. After only four years of college education based on the Soviet model, this was somewhat farcical. Mao felt instinctively that Cezanne had created something eternal but was not exactly sure what that ‘something eternal’ actually was! The quality of reproductions available to him was inferior and the young man was only beginning to ponder the big questions surrounding the meaning of life and society. His thesis, filled with admiration and respect for Cezanne, clearly could shed little light on his subject.
As Mao and his friends came to know more about the life of artists in late 19th and early 20th century Paris, they began to dream of having their own ‘Café Montmartre’ and of leading the romantic, unconventional and unrestrained Bohemian life of Parisian artists, as they painted and discussed art. Believing that society might provide them with a better artistic creative environment, they were anxious to break away from the tedium of college life, but as soon as Mao returned to the department store under the auspices of his former unit, he became disillusioned. The tasteless window displays and lackluster advertising made him realize that reality was far removed from the poetic dreams he had earlier cherished. There was no culture and no art in his day to day reality. ‘Society did not take art seriously’, he remarked, convinced that there was no artistic and cultural environment in society. Moreover, in the eyes of Mao and his friends, the Artists’ Associations seemed both ‘too remote’ (tai yaoyuan) and ‘unfathomable’ (buzhi weihewu). Official exhibitions were not worth participating in and so contrary to the expectations of the young graduate that reality held no particular meaning. Before graduation, Mao had been hopeful, exhilarated by the lectures by Li Zehou, Gao Ertai, Zhu Hong, and others on aesthetics, modernist fiction, and absurd drama at the Kunming Institute of Nationalities, but his dream of becoming a painter was, however, ‘soon shattered by the strict eight-hour working day and jobs unrelated to painting. The conflict between reality and his ideals had increasingly intensified’.
Shortly after graduation, Mao married his college sweetheart. From a portrait of his wife painted after their wedding and another painting simply titled Love (Ai, 1983), we can see that at the start of this short-lived marriage the couple shared some happy moments. For his honeymoon, Mao went to Guishan, a place he would frequent in later years. This is a place with blue skies, red earth, snow-white sheep and unsophisticated Sani villagers. Guishan not only stirred Mao’s memories of childhood, but the place also imbued in him a deeply felt sense of the consolation and lyrical qualities provided by nature. Although Mao had been to Guishan while still at college, it was only with hindsight and experience that the young man began to see ‘the look in the eyes of the shepherd girl and her sheep’ as ‘a chapter in a story’ (yihui shi). This deep love of nature is widespread among China’s South-western artists, such as He Duoling and Zhou Chunya from Sichuan who drew artistic inspiration from their trips to the grasslands in Aba and other Tibetan areas. Mao Xuhui, Zhang Xiaogang and Ye Yongqing found their muse at Guishan in Yunnan province, despite their later very different interpretations of the place.
From 1982 to 1983, Mao read a lot of modern Western literary and philosophical writing, including works by Ernest Hemingway, Saul Bellow, John August Strindberg, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, T. S. Eliot, Arthur Schopenhauer, Hermann Hesse, Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre. In the same period, Mao also began to listen to modern music, with Shostakovich and Stravinsky leaving an indelible impression on him. He later recalled that ‘music unconsciously categorized things for me’. He acknowledged, for example, that Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a good artist, but in his heart of hearts, he preferred works by expressionist artists like Oskar Kokoschka and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Music like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring particularly excited him because it evoked the primeval forests of Yunnan that he had visited and he could hear the roar of the wind in those forests through that music. The terrible side of nature aroused a deep-seated sense of horror in Mao, and although he had many opportunities to go to Guishan for psychological consolation, this sense of horror forms a leitmotif in his artistic development, when coupled with his social experiences.
In 1984, within the space of a single week, Mao created his first batch of paintings, including Red Cube (Hongse tiji, 1984), The Cube in Motion (Yundong zhong de tiji, 1984), The Cube Still in Expansion (Hai zai pengzhang de tiji, 1984) and Red Human Figure (Hongse renti, 1984). Even without the explanation of the artist himself, we can sense a dangerous state of psychological collapse in these works, in which instinct seems poised to destroy man. But at that time, the artist was searching for ‘release’ (shifang) and attempting to grasp reality during this process of release. In 1984 he wrote: ‘Everyone must hold some view of this world, releasing it without applying any standards in the first place’. If we believe what Gombrich reveals about patterns in the history of art, then in a sensitive work such as Red Cube we readily find the spiritual prototypes for Mao’s works.
Most young Chinese artists in the 1980s remember well the exhibition featuring works from Armand Hammer’s art collection and the show of German expressionist works held in Beijing in 1982. For the majority of Chinese artists, the oils shown at these two exhibitions were the first genuine oil paintings they had ever seen, and viewing the exhibits, they acquired a tangibly direct and authentic understanding of both the classic spirit and the modern conception. This understanding would eventually ‘end the long deceptive history of relying on reproductions’. In the exhibition of the Hammer collection Mao found the soul of Guishan in the paintings by Corot, but of course, there is only so much consolation man can find in nature. Confronted by expressionist works, Mao felt that ‘you cannot control yourself in front of those paintings, which contain shocking power’. Mao realized that ‘I belong to this type’ of art. His inner need determined the general expressionist mood that runs throughout his paintings, and Red Cube and other works were the first of his paintings to demonstrate this tendency.
Although Mao had embarked on an artistic career that differed from the one expected by the authorities, he still hoped to take part in official exhibitions. In 1985, to select art works for the Sixth National Art Exhibition, the Yunnan Artists’ Association organized an exhibition that solicited works from the entire province. Both Mao Xuhui and Zhang Xiaogang submitted paintings for the exhibition. Mao’s Guishan series featured gentle landscapes, which would have seemed to increase the odds of his works being selected, but the association decided to display only one of his paintings, an oil titled Guishan: Its Remoteness (Guishan: Yaoyuan, 1985), which was included in a collection of paintings that failed to enter the Sixth National Art Exhibition. The artist, disappointed that his works were shown at the provincial exhibition in a fragmented manner, almost withdrew his painting before the exhibition started. Ever since then, Mao has had no faith in official exhibitions.
After painting Red Cube, Mao produced the Guishan series. Since his works neither won official recognition nor were they understood, he found no opportunity to exhibit. Mao and his friends went on to lead somewhat self-destructive lives, ‘smoking and drinking copiously’, until one day in 1985 when Zhang Long, a friend studying at the Department of Fine Arts in East China Normal University in Shanghai, came back to Kunming on vacation. When he saw the paintings by Mao Xuhui, Zhang Xiaogang and Pan Dehai, he grew excited, saying that ‘the paintings of Shanghai artists are too insipid, too sweet, and too lifeless’. Mao records this episode in his interesting essay entitled ‘On the New Figurative Images Art Exhibition, the Artists Involved and the Southwestern Art Research Group’ (Ji Xinjuxiang huazhan he huajia yiji Xinan Yishu Yanjiu Tuanti, 1987):
[Zhang Long] proposed that we stage a show in Shanghai. He could help us arrange the exhibition venue, but we had to share the expenses. So our most urgent task was earning some money. To that end, we got involved with interior decoration companies and engaged in remodeling houses and drawing up plans. We put in a great deal of effort for a time, but made little money. Then a telegram came from Shanghai. As the exhibition venue had been arranged, we had to act quickly. We had to borrow money. Pan (Dehai) had 600 yuan, Mao (Xuhui) borrowed 300, and Zhang (Xiaogang) borrowed 200. The three of us packed our paintings into eight boxes and made two trips on a tricycle to the railroad station to arrange their shipment. Due to the urgency, we used an express service, which cost us 400 yuan. Both Pan and Mao asked their bosses for leave of absence before they went to Shanghai for the exhibition. Zhang was stranded in Kunming on business. We had to do everything related to the show in person, such as painting the advertising, printing invitations, advertising in newspapers, moving and hanging the paintings, and decorating the venue. At night we slept in the student dorm or classrooms at the Department of Fine Arts in the East China Normal University, and we had to evade the questions of campus guards on a daily basis. The happy time in the evenings was spent in the university beverage lounge with jazz and coffee. Apart from Zhang Long, Hou Wenyi from Shanghai also took part in the show. After graduating from Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in 1982, she was assigned to work in a small town in Hunan province. She stayed there for a few years before she found a job in the Shanghai Institute of Culture and History. She was penniless too... She proposed that our show be named New Figurative Images and we approved it on instinct... Before the opening of the show, Hou Wenyi got another artist, Xu Kan, a sculptor who graduated from Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, to also join the show. He didn’t contribute much monetarily to the show. We only asked him to buy some paints. In June 1985, the exhibition opened at the Jing’an District Cultural Center in Shanghai. A girl presented us with a basket of fresh flowers. The rent for the venue was 30 yuan a day, and we were not to share in the take from admissions. On the first day, there were many visitors, old and young, including personages from Shanghai art circles, such as the late Guan Liang and Mr. Ada. The exhibition hall, with 120 works on show, was hot with such a big crowd. Some of the metal sculptures had to be displayed in the passageway. We were all shaking hands with visitors and explaining our works to them. Everyone felt that the exhibition was exciting.
The New Figurative Images exhibition played an important role in Mao’s artistic career because it was the first exhibition staged through the artist’s own efforts and also the first show that displayed his works in their entirety. The things that the artist had been trying to convey over the past few years were well received. In the subsequent exhibition held in Nanjing, Mao sensed the significance of his art works through the hospitality lavished on him by a dozen Nanjing University students, but Mao did not quite realize just how significant the New Figurative Images exhibition was at that time. The period between 1985 and 1986 is very important in the history of contemporary Chinese art. In the wake of the overthrow of the Gang of Four in 1976, the thought emancipation movement eventually led within a decade to the strong ’85 New Wave Art Movement. It was quite common for young artists to set up their own groups and stage exhibitions during this period, and the social and cultural realities at that time made it possible for artists with a new artistic outlook to enjoy adequate freedom for their activities and creative work.
With financial help from Zhang Zhen, a female poet in Shanghai, and Ma Gang, a friend of the artist, the New Figurative Images exhibition was staged in a health education center in Nanjing. During the show Mao also received help from Ding Fang, another important artist of the ’85 period. Shortly afterwards, Ding Fang and other artists in Nanjing organized the Art Week Featuring Contemporary Artworks by Young Jiangsu Artists. This was the period when Mao’s hoped for ‘release’ seemed actually achievable.
The New Figurative Images exhibition caught the attention of Gao Minglu, a critic who played a very important role in the ’85 period. He began to communicate with Mao and introduced Mao and his works in his essays on the ’85 New Wave. In August 1986, Mao participated in ’85 Youth Art Trends: Large-scale Slide Exhibition and Academic Symposium, also known as the Zhuhai Meeting, masterminded by Gao Minglu, Wang Guangyi and Shu Qun, and staged in the special economic zone of Zhuhai in Guangdong province. This was a major gathering of new wave artists, showcasing the modernist scene in China at that time and occupying an important position in the development of new wave contemporary Chinese art.
Encouraged and influenced by the Zhuhai Meeting, Mao, on returning to Kunming, set up in October of the same year two Southwestern art groups after consultation with Zhang Xiaogang, Ye Yongqing, Pan Dehai and Zhang Long. Members included Mao Jie, Zhang Hua, Deng Qiyiao, Ms. Sun Guojuan, Ms. Zhang Xiaping, Su Jianghua and his wife Yang Huangli whose style resembled that of Jiang Tiefeng. In order to promote the artists of the southwest, they simultaneously staged the third New Figurative Images exhibition in Kunming. (The second one had been organized by Zhang Long at the Shanghai Art Gallery) The exhibition, called The Third New Figurative Images Exhibition of Artworks and Academic Papers, took the form of slide shows. The number of participants far exceeded the first show. Apart from the members of the south-western art groups, Dong Chao of Shandong province and Ding Defu (a classmate of Pan Dehai) of Henan province also exhibited their works. The author of a review article carried in the first issue of Youth and Society (Qingnian yu shehui), a magazine founded in Yunnan in 1988, recorded the impact of the New Figurative Images show: ‘The signal sent by the New Figurative Images evoked an immediate response. From 1986 to 1987, young artists began to get out of their studios and make themselves known to society. Exhibitions included Art Exhibition of Southern Barbarians (Nan Manzi Huazhan), Empty House Club (Kongwu Huahui), Murky Artwork Show (Meng Zuopin Zhan), Seven Star Art Exhibition (Qixing Huazhan), Art Show Featuring Works by Three Students from the Yunnan Art School (Yunnan Yishu Xueyuan San Xuesheng Huazhan), Art Exhibition of Eight Kunming Youths (Kunming Ba Qingnian Meizhan), Luo Hui’s Solo Art Show (Luo Hui Geren Huazhan) ... to name but a few’.
The influence and impact of the New Figurative Images aroused the attention of Art Trends (Meishu sichao), an avant-garde magazine at the time. Its editor-in-chief asked Mao to contribute articles on the artistic thought of New Figurative Images. Mao’s essay titled ‘New Figurative Images: The Appearance and Transcendence of Live Image Patterns’ (Xinjuxiang: Shengming juxiang tushi de chengxian he chaoyue) was published in the first issue of Art Trends in 1987. It is probably only now that the erstwhile New Figurative Images artists have come to realize that the name of the exhibition they chose randomly in 1985 has become an indelible historical symbol and an invaluable piece of imagery that signaled a cultural trend. Mao later recalled: ‘New Figurative Images is a term uttered casually by Hou Wenyi. We accepted it without giving it too much thought. None of us actually knew what it meant’. But it was the startling works on display that gave New Figurative Images its major cultural significance. This was probably a result of an atmosphere created by the ’85 new wave. Many of the theoretical terms and vocabulary used by Mao in his essays originated in the works of various philosophers and novelists, but in Mao’s writing the terms were given new meanings. The long time Mao spent on the road and the piles of artworks that he could not sell placed great pressure on Mao’s family life. His wife wanted a stable and secure family life. According to Mao, ‘She saw through this society too early. She was closer to reality and tried hard to adapt herself to it, but I wanted to lead a creative life’. In the face of their differences, the artist felt extremely guilty: ‘I couldn’t even support my family’. Whatever the reason, the couple split up in early 1987. Mao in Art and Life, published in 1991, wrote of this period: ‘My major paintings after 1986 began to express my family crisis and my distress at having to face this situation. These paintings reflect how my marriage was on the verge of falling apart. ...I think the main cause of my family crisis was that I focused all my efforts on painting without paying enough attention to my family. I couldn’t integrate family life with my painting, and in the end I chose painting. But the choice was actually beyond my control, and I felt bad inside because I couldn’t strike a balance. This state of mind is depicted in oil paintings like Human Bodies in a Cement Room: Noon (Shuini fangjian li de renti: Zhengwu, 1986), Human Bodies in a Cement Room: Several States (Shuini fangjian li de renti: Jizhong zhuangtai, 1986), the Private Space series (Siren kongjian xilie, 1986-1987) and the Portraits of Woman and Man series (Nüren he nanren de xiaoxiang xilie, 1987)’. In 1988, Mao entered his oil paintings titled Private Space: Self-Imprisonment (Siren kongjian: Ziqiu, 1987) and Paternalism (Jiazhang, 1988) in the 1988 Southwestern Art Exhibition. This show presaged the creation of the ongoing Paternalism series in the coming years. Paternalism at the show laid down the basics for the future Paternalism series in a vague, yet nevertheless discernible manner. The Paternalism series, made up of about a dozen oils completed after June 1989, will reveal more substantially the nature of images of life and present a creative narrative of the soul.Every artist maintains artistic principles that stem from the artist’s initial understanding of art, and these principles later become a private realm of thought for the artist. Mao was passionate about expressionism and instinctively sensitive to important issues surrounding human nature and society, despite the fact that he has never defined himself as ‘an observer of the soul’.
Great social changes took place in China in the 1990s. The idealized enthusiasm and the reflection on politicized art which played such a dynamic role in the 1980s met new social challenges in the form of the market economy, the impact of which resulted either in the total elimination of essentialism in the spiritual realm or the silencing of the artist. Commenting on the phenomenon in 2000, Mao observed, ‘Since commercialism was rampant everywhere, and since artists no longer cared about art, was there any art still left?’ More personally, he wrote: ‘After I gave up drinking in 1993, I became very taciturn. I believed that for people like me class was now out. I didn’t know what to say about realities that exhausted me and even left me feeling aphasic! I didn’t like the new way of talking, and I wasn’t able to adapt to it at all’.
Born in the 1950s, Mao Xuhui had experienced all the major changes New China had undergone and these had profoundly influenced him. From his Paternalism series created in the 1980s, we can see that his tenacious will held up during those earlier social changes, which only strengthened his self-belief rather than make him more compliant. The advent of commercial society, however, aroused his concern that an individual’s experiences should provide spiritual value in the present, and that past experiences, whether personal feelings or a rudimentary respect for human nature, are the proper measure of human worth. As he followed this train of thought, he expressed a deep concern about the new commercialization: ‘When the advertising industry began to develop and everyone tried to go into business, the plane trees that grew up with us still generously provided us with free shade and touches of color as they always had, as did their friends like the tall and dark eucalypts and the poplars. These city trees saw us through from the 1950s to the 1990s, thriving in the dust, soot and exhaust laden atmosphere through different periods without uttering any complaint’. (Journal at the Palm Camp, 1995) Artists with this nostalgic temperament seemed to be doomed to suffer, and Mao’s experiences not only made him sensitive to the anxieties brought about by the latest social changes but also encouraged him to anticipate future disasters. Mao had no time for the ‘carefree’ artistic attitude, and he could not tolerate a cynical or detached artistic position. The individual is always relatively powerless, and while trying to compensate for the loss of collective idealism that evaporated with commercialization and replace it with his own sense of idealism, Mao became engulfed by loneliness that is reflected in his life and work. Contemplating the nature of universal ‘authority’ (quanli) when he painted the Paternalism series led Mao to determinedly defend the ‘authority’ of the individual, and the themes of his paintings began to explicate the individual’s world. In his 1995 account titled Journal at the Palm Camp he wrote: ‘We can only sympathy for ourselves. Confronted by the supreme and perfect world, our shortcomings are self-apparent. We can’t control the course of our own life, nor can we ever be sure that we will reach our destination on time’. Mao’s spiritual struggle reminds us of Schopenhauer’s tragic philosophy in which man feels pain when he can’t fulfill his desires and ennui when his desires are fulfilled. Mao’s problem was probably not so much ‘his suffering’, but rather his knowledge of the root of that suffering.
In 1993, he convalesced at home after a serious illness. This provided him with time and space to confront the burning issues. Yet while he found material peace, his spiritual life was going haywire, like the ongoing construction projects in the world outside. His contemplation of metaphysical issues triggered anxiety: ‘What is the meaning of life? Tell me precisely. It is just like that pair of blue plastic slip-ons in front of the door, practical, simple in design and so perfectly positioned’. (Journal at the Palm Camp, 1995) Daily life provided the spiritual resources required by the artist during that period. The creation of the Daily Epic (Richang shishi, 1994) series of works was both part of Mao’s long process of exploration of the overarching theme of life’s meaning and his personal defense against the irresistible tides of commercial society. Feeling that most of the countryside had lost its pristine beauty, he could only attempt to retain that beauty in his own private world. Finally, in Daily Epic: Scissors (Richang shishi: Jiandao, 1994), the artist found the means to express his rage and anxiety. The historical significance of ‘authority’ in Paternalism was now cut into by the incisive work Scissors, which dramatically expressed a reality that is more or less hopeless. This seemed to be a natural development for the artist: Scissors cut apart the sensual relationship between the artistic reflection on big themes related to ‘daily life’ and the idea of authority.
In the mid 1990s, the artist’s enthusiasm was fired by the extreme insecurity revealed by the structurally stable mode of expression he adopted in Scissors. In sorting through the complex system of meanings introduced by a concrete daily article, Mao Xuhui found that his expression became more direct and much simpler, concealing functions behind form and placing form in front of artistic spirit. He reduced Scissors to their simplest form, turning them into what he called ‘a large memory repository’ or a ‘storehouse of memories’. In his works Mao now omitted most of the peaceful background silence, indicating the adoption of a strategy of circuitous resistance. As he has described it:
In the 1990s when government policies championed economic construction, art remained utterly silent.... As an artist of this generation, you can only extend your antennae into the larger social space, or remain silent about contemporary art issues. Artists today are dumbfounded by the dire situation in economics and politics, and talk of social reform is only a romantic gesture, regardless of the personal perspective artists try to bring to general issues. All in all, it is hard to achieve anything in art without a personal perspective. Our basic attitude can only be to look straight in the eye at our own reality, as well as at history and the present condition of our country. Our starting point should be concern for the fate of China, that is, the fate of our generation, as we individually perceive it. As a matter of fact, the fate of our country largely determines the fate of our generation. I’m not a determinist, but the will of the individual does not confer the wings of romanticism. The will of the individual is a fringe player that provides support for an alienated existence. It is absurd for the artist to contribute to society when the artist is the one paying all the expenses. (My Vitae: Where Should We Start on Contemporary Art? 1993)
The 20th century was approaching its end after Mao Xuhui had long since embarked on his significant artistic journey and registered so many artistically indisputable achievements. From New Figurative Images to upholding expressionism, and then strategically resisting pop and popular culture, Mao’s personal history was heavily colored throughout by idealism and expressionism.
One night in October 2002, Mao talked on the phone with Xin Haizhou, his very close friend and one of China’s most important contemporary artists. During the ensuing telephone speech by Xin Haizhou, Mao felt that Xin was ‘drunk’, but Xin was only expressing his sincere views on Mao’s artistic worth:
Time is really a good judge, and everything is now clear. Place your paintings from the 1980s to the present day side by side. They may seem to be unrelated, fragmentary pieces, running through from the work Red Cube that ‘spews blood incessantly’, exposing man to be a product of authority, down to the enigmatic Scissors of today. These paintings encapsulate the relationship between your art, your life and the changing times. From the beginning of life, through its growth and on to its maturity, time has arranged these seemingly contradictory and disorderly styles into a logical order formed by life itself. In some way beyond our comprehension, time has eliminated the various strange traps presented by different human dramas and historic encounters at different times. I’ve noticed the special significance you give to your idea of ‘the era’. In your 1999 journal, you wrote: ‘The era is a label, a shell, a general shape, just like a hat and jacket that can be changed at any time... Art has become a smorgasbord of sociological concepts, economic concepts, and fashion concepts’. (Xin Haizhou, ‘A Unilateral Record of a Telephone Conversation with Mao Xuhui’, 31 October 2002)
This exchange between the two artists remains at the ‘intellectual’ level, but in the eyes of Mao Xuhui as an ordinary person, the world had indeed lost its allure. On the rational level, he knew that human change follows its own logic, but on the perceptive level, he had become totally pessimistic. For Mao, the world was no longer a warm and harmonious place. For a long time he had been anxious about the seemingly endless but insignificant problems in his daily life, and this sensitivity made it impossible for him to discard either his earlier utopian ideas or his pessimistic fears, even though he was well aware that such a state of mind was hopeless. In June 2000, after comparing the ending of The History of Modern Chinese Art: 1979-1989 (Zhongguo xiandai yishu shi: 1979-1989, 1992) with The History of Contemporary Chinese Art: 1990-1999 (Zhongguo dangdai yishu shi: 1990-1999, 2000), Mao wrote the following comment:
From the conclusion of the first book, we can see that modern Chinese art is full of hope, but after reading the conclusion of the second book, I think that now we can only pray for art. This conclusion is embittered, but true. Sometimes I feel that the country and the city in which I live have changed beyond recognition. They are no longer friendly. We were the cultural catalyst for that change, but we didn’t expect the situation to turn into something like this. People have not developed a deeper understanding and appreciation of art, nor have artists actually made any spiritual progress. Artistic circles have lost their romantic and aspiring ambience. Profit has strangled everything, replacing valuable friendships, the sacrificial spirit and metaphysical discussions. Apart from profit, nobody has faith in anything. In the past few years, I often think of Nietzsche, and of his statement that ‘God is dead’. This is our reality. It is first of all a spiritual death. I also think of that line in T. S. Eliot’s Wasteland: ‘This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper’. How miserable! How cruel! The world ends not with something heroic, but with only a whimper. The 20th century ended under our very eyes. It ended without any heroes, without any spiritual leaders, leaving contemporary art in chaos and confusion. Of course, it has also left behind a lot of material for reflection, some clues, craziness and chaos that will result in death.
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