This oil painting consists of three connected canvases. At left is an expanded portrayal of Liu Chunhua’s Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan (1957), depicting a young Mao Zedong in a Chinese gown against a mountainous landscape. A compressed and monochromatic reproduction of Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat (1793), which portrays the murdered journalist and French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat in his bath, is presented at right. The middle red canvas with yellow text explains the paintings’ sources and their transformations. Wang Xingwei painted this work early in his career. He is known for appropriating motifs from Chinese and Western art history and creating versions of the same subject with different compositions. Here, Wang combines an image that was widely distributed during the Cultural Revolution in China (1966–1976) and a well-known painting from the French Revolution (1789–1799). The size and colour distortions suggest the emphasis on different histories of revolution in Chinese society. The work recalls another of Wang’s oil paintings, The Oriental Way: The Road to Anyuan (1995), which also references Liu’s 1957 work but features a rear view of the artist in place of Mao.
Wang Xingwei (born 1969, Shenyang) graduated from the Fine Art Department of Shenyang Normal University in 1990. In the early 1990s, he pioneered a painting style linking visual references from Chinese and Western visual art and historical practices, producing works that draw on theatricality and kitsch performativity. Wang lives and works in Beijing.