Special preliminary report on the 300th auction
From 1949 to 1973, Mao Zedong, founder of the People’s Republic of China, was also its “Great Chairman”. To this day, Mao is revered like a saint by parts of the Chinese population. However, Mao’s rule was characterized by lawlessness, terror and totalitarian violence. The “Great Helmsman” brought the Middle Kingdom to the edge of the abyss.
Art and literature were at the time of the Cultural Revolution in the years 1966-1976, art and literature were a kind of “party art”, a total regulation of representations and forms of expression in which the cult of personality dominated (heroes, Mao, peasants, craftsmen, soldiers). This “Red Art” was a unique period in Chinese art, caused by the Cultural Revolution.
Mao Zedong became a cult figure who liberated China from foreign rule, unified it and led it into the modern age. During the Cultural Revolution, statues of Mao adorned offices, factories, museums, universities, schools and politburos. There were neither free markets nor potential buyers for these works.
High-quality large porcelain Mao statues were only commissioned by the government and given as gifts to deserving members of the Revolutionary Committee, diplomats, embassy staff or foreign politicians from other communist brother states. As a result, production was low and these pieces are virtually untraceable on the market today, as most of the statues were destroyed in offices, universities, schools and factories shortly after the end of the Cultural Revolution. Apart from in museums or some private collections, not much remains.
The porcelain masters in Jingdezhen also produced smaller Mao figurines or busts, intended for the “common people” to display in their mostly cramped living rooms. However, these too were often smashed after the end of the Cultural Revolution out of anger at Mao.
In the meantime, however, interest in these Chinese ceramics from the 1960s to the mid-1970s has grown again and goes far beyond the mere character of collector’s items. Chinese art historians refer to this period as the “Red Age”. The collecting of objects from the Cultural Revolution period and their transformation into internationally recognized revolutionary art only began 30 years after the Cultural Revolution. It is a form of coming to terms with the past that is now being reappraised by many museums around the world. The exhibition at the Art Museum of the Chinese University in Hong Kong in 2004 was an important step towards incorporating the porcelains of the Cultural Revolution into the world of fine art. Fan Jianchan founded the world’s largest Cultural Revolution Museum in Anren in 2005. His book had already been published in 2002: “The Cultural Revolution Porcelain Wares”. In 2011, the Museum of Ethnology in Vienna held another exhibition with the theme: “The Culture of the Cultural Revolution”. The Wende Museum in Los Angeles organized an exhibition (DE) “Constructing Ideology: The Cultural Revolution and beyond” in 2022/2023.