Here’s a fascinating little online exhibition from the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney that charts the development of Chinese revolutionary dress, and in particular the Mao suit (zhifu). It’s part of a larger virtual exhibition entitled Evolution and Revolution: Chinese dress 1700s-1990s. Check out the page on the sartorial ideology of the Cultural Revolution as well. When I was much younger I desperately wanted to be a costume historian when I grew up. Perhaps there’s still a chance!
December 27, 2007
Modern Mao papercuts
To commemorate the Great Helmsman’s 114th birthday, Wu Suizhou, whom CCTV describes as a ‘folk artist’, has produced a set of papercuts. The photographs on the CCTV website aren’t very clear (Xinhua is better), but it looks like he has chosen classic propagandist modes of representations of Mao and other communist icons as his models. Indeed, there’s nothing very new here. In the bottom right-hand corner in black is a papercut showing Mao, Lenin, Marx and Engels in profile. This is a copy of similar papercuts available during the Cultural Revolution. (The British Museum and Musee du Quai Branly have examples in their collections.)
