Nusantara.com: essays: idol hands

Wang Keping and the new Chinese sculpture, iii

An early successful piece of Wang's was called Long, Long Life. It shows a skinny arm coming out of the top of a slogan-shouting head, holding a little red book. Here we see many things: Wang's political feeling, his rawness, and a joy with the freedom he has found to stick on arm on a head: "I started out with a rectangular pirce of wood, and planned to make a sculpture of a person 'holding high'Mao's Little Red Book and shouting slogans. I was having trouble rendering the hand and arm in a natural manner, and then something in the wood gave me a hint about how to proceed. I ended up having the arm growing out of the head." It is an effective and disturbing image of thought-police irrationality.



In his government-subsidized studio in the high-rise suburb of Aubervilles, outside the Paris ring road, Wang talked about how he developed his own ideas of art and expression while working in theatre. He found Theatre of the Absurd a rich source of inspiration. By then hardly radical in Western terms, Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett's way of draining language of meaning, and reality of its realness, resonated strongly, provided a model for expressing the absurdity of Communist authority. Filmmaker Tien Zhuang Zhuang's Black Cannon Incident is one example of how the absurd worked well as an artistic reaction to the Chinese experience, at least in the comparatively innocent time between the fall of Mao and Tiananmen Square.



So in the full flush of his new form, Wang Keping produced some of the most stunning works of the Stars exhibits, held in a park outside the China Art Gallery after they were denied a venue. They shocked and delighted Beijing audiences. The October 1, 1979 demonstration for democracy and artistic freedom that was led by the Stars showed that the post-Mao era had arrived in China. The event marked, in Geremie Barm‚'s words "the bifurcation of canoncial state art and the alternative or parallel visual arts cultures that had been developing surreptitiously since the early 1970s." Wang Keping marched in the front rank.



One of Wang's pieces had a deep impact on Being audiences. "Idol" is a long and narrow, but fleshy, face, wearing a tallish rectangular cap emblazoned with a star, thick jowls, one eye closed. This was the most talked-about piece in an exhibition that attracted close to 200,000 people in Beijing over two weeks. Why? Because it was interpreted ina very specific way. To the people of Beijing, this "Idol" was Mao Zedong, and that winking eye, well, it was no less than the old man admitting that the Cultural Revolution was his doing...This was the first time that anyone had the courage to say that Mao was responsible for the Cultural Revolution. But was Wang Keping in fact trying to say that?



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