Lot 1579: SHI XINNING

SHI XINNING
(B. 1969)
Royal Coach
oil on canvas
210 x 317 cm. (82 5/8 x 124 3/4 in.)
Painted in 2006

London, UK, The Saatchi Gallery, The Revolution Continues: New Chinese Art, 9 October 2008-18 January 2009.

Saatchi Gallery, The Revolution Continues, London, UK, 2008 (illustrated, pp. 58-59).

The image of Chairman Mao has become one of the most ubiquitous images in contemporary art. Artists as diverse as Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and Leon Golub have borrowed the Great Helmsman's iconic image at various stages of their careers. Over the last three decades, Mao's image inevitably has also become a core motif for contemporary Chinese artists, particularly for practitioners of Chinese Political Pop, an appellation loosely defining artist who employed the charged and contested image of China's foremost leader in order to highlight the nation's extraordinary transformation in the years following his death.
Rather than commenting on China's consumerist turn, Shi Xinning instead takes a playfully interventionist role in re-writing history and historical memory. Beginning in 2000, Shi began re-working popular Western mass media images, particularly those from the 1960s and 1970s - paparazzi photos of Hollywood celebrities or famous images of political diplomacy - and inserting Mao's figure into the composition. Rather than the implacable "official" visage hanging over the Tian'anmen Gate, Mao appears instead as a lively elder statesmen, dressed in formal communist attire, but clearly having a grand time hobnobbing with a jetset elite.

In Royal Coach (Lot 1579) from 2006, Shi Xinning inserts the Chairman in a carriage alongside England's Queen Mother in a scene apparently lifted from Prince Charles and Princess Diana's wedding procession, but an image which could equally come from any number of state processions. The Queen Mother turns amiably towards Mao while he smiles, looking relaxed and clearly enjoying the occasion.

Shi paints in a grand historical scale but deliberately minimizes any painterly effects, mimicking instead the crude print quality of black and white newspaper photography. The scene is dense with a surging, exuberant crowd, and Shi makes only the most understated of alterations, replacing the Union Jack flag with that of the People's Republic of China.

Shi has said, "I almost always work with a staging of completely incompatible props and sceneryK I am not interested in Mao Tse-tung as a real person. Today, Mao is still an icon in China. He is omnipresent; he defined my childhood and the lives of my parents. I never show him in the real context of the 60s or 70s. I present him as a visual memory". (Shi Xinning: Polyphony, Arnt&Parner, Berlin/Zurich, 2007, p. 43) As such, it is not clear if Shi's intent is irony, comedy, or historical lament. His insertion of an improbable image of Mao reminds us of similar political pageants within China from the same period, while also underlining the frivolity and pomp of Western popular culture and political showboating. In doing so, he quietly reminds us of how far apart these worlds were at the time, and how quickly the historical memory of China's 1960s and 1970s has been replaced a relentlessly forward-looking new nation.