This oil painting depicts a profile view of Mao Zedong looking into the distance, with a boy and a girl in the foreground. The children smile cheerfully, and the boy holds onto Mao’s arm. The background features Tiananmen Square, with the Great Hall of the People at the centre. Faint dots appear on Mao’s suit and in the sky, where lanterns and streamers can also be seen. Three red flowers at the bottom left corner echo the colour of the children’s scarves. This painting is based on a photograph taken by Hou Bo in 1951, showing Mao with two children from the Young Pioneers, a youth organisation of the Chinese Communist Party. Influenced by Andy Warhol and Richard Hamilton, Yu began his Mao paintings in the late 1980s, shifting from his earlier abstract compositions with circles. The collage-like appearance here is characteristic of these paintings, which combine the kitsch of pop art with propaganda imagery from the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976).
Yu Youhan (born Shanghai, 1943-2023) graduated from the Shanghai Institute of Industrial Arts in 1970, He works in painting with the aesthetic style of Political Pop, which fuses Chinese iconography with Western artistic expression, thereby illuminating the meeting point of two cultural histories.