Eating Mao Zedong

In the video sequence, performance artist Chris Ryan eats Mao Zedong miniatures made from candy. They were cast from a porcelain figurine of Mao bought at a Beijing antique market in 1999. These ubiquitous porcelain figurines canonised many of the communist party heroes and were made by "re-educated" artisans working in ceramic workshops. The souvenirs were often presented to party functionaries bringing the revolution from the street into the home while fulfilling their purpose as propaganda.

Part adventurers dream, part DIY instructional video—an absurdist tone is set as Chris eats through the pop confection sweating profusely while cocooned in a high altitude snow suit. Accompanying the video, the same objects are re-cast in resin and arranged on a shelf as a tourist supermarket. These were available for purchase and replenished for the duration of the exhibition.

The act reconstituting Mao into candy extends the existing industry of Cultural Revolution commodification, begun in 1949 by the Maoist propaganda effort. It has seen Mao transformed into novelty pens, wristwatches and cigarette lighters that play the national anthem. Both great revolutionary and brutal dictator, the work amplifies the bleak irony in now selling Mao miniatures as tourist souvenirs. There is also a comic register generated through the discontinuity between their material kitschness and their purposefully childlike execution while referencing some fairly dark moments in Chinese history. As such, the work celebrates a kind of natural retribution—the humorous shift in meaning and function these objects have taken on.

Due to their ubiquity and the transformed political landscape of China today, Mao has also become a benign symbol of 'Chineseness'. As such the work parodies tourist’s whimsical and often misguided fascinations with a foreign culture—where our expectations of a place that are then realised through forms of symbolic exchange within the tourist industry through the souvenirs we collect are often antithetical to our experience.