Kaleidoscope

History is the family portrait of man. History is motivated by statesmen and entrepreneurs. History is written by intellectuals and recorded by artists. History is enacted and experienced by all. History is who and what we are today. It is in this spirit that Ren Hong turns to the memory of her childhood. Her art is a personal reflection of the ever-changing patterns of social and visual history. The recent focus of her kaleidoscope is the Cultural Revolution, arguably one of the most outstanding epochs of Chinese History.

Perhaps one of the reasons I have been drawn to Ren Hong’s work is the memory it conjures of my own exposure to the theatrical spectacle and schismatic chaos of the Cultural Revolution. I have fond memories of being taken by my father into a secret world of the Chinese Youth League housed above the Dixon Street restaurants of Sydney’s Chinatown, to view the news reels of the momentous pageants in Tiananmen Square and screenings of the latest model opera. For me, it was an entree into another world that set me apart from my peers, and I cherished it. Within my own family, there was much debate on the merits of the Cultural Revolution. My father, a peasant from a fishing village on Hainan Island, embittered by the hardships of war and poverty of his youth, had nothing but praise for Mao and New China. My mother, on the other hand, was a western bohemian intellectual who, despite her socialist sympathies, was horrified by the mass hysteria and violence of the Red Guards and recognized that she would have been one of the first to be humiliated.

It is over thirty years since the close of the Cultural Revolution, and it is now well and truly a part of the Chinese family folklore with seemingly little relevance to today. However, curiously, in the context of Chinese Contemporary Art, we have seen a plethora of images of Mao and Cultural Revolution iconography reemerge. One is compelled to ask the question, Why? Is it that artists are purely jumping on a commercial bandwagon of creating works that they know will appeal to an anachronistic Western perception of China?  Indeed, such was the power of the Cultural Revolution aesthetic that for many in the West, China is still Mao, unisex suits, and bicycles. Or is it an expression of something more?  Is it an expression of a profound sense of loss, lack of identity, and insecurity in an increasingly homogenized world where the only thing of value and object of aspiration is a Louis Vuitton bag?

For me, the strength of Ren Hong’s work lies in the intelligent and creative presentation of the past to inspire a commentary on the contemporary fabric of material well-being and social values. The princes and princesses of Ren Hong’s childhood affection were not real estate tycoons, gyrating pop singers, or lascivious film stars high on ecstasy, but rather ordinary workers, peasants, soldiers, who were non-material in aspiration, asexual in romance, joyful in shared poverty, and idealistic in their pursuit of a utopian dream of selflessness and egalitarianism. It is they who are the subject of Ren Hong’s portraiture and memory.

Ren Hong’s unique visual language sets her work apart from others. Her powerful canvases are a marriage of classic portraiture, pop art, and contemporary graphics. The paintings are dualistic in nature. Superimposed on the images of her childhood fantasy is a contemporary graphic of repeated icons that march in unison across the base portrait. Selected icons include the hammer and sickle, rising sun, birds, arrows, and so on. It is the repeated icon that creates the kaleidoscopic effect of transporting one through time and space from present to past and vice versa. The repeated icon serves to break up the base image, the partial obliteration deconstructs the original image, and evokes the perception of a fading memory. The repeated icon itself creates a dramatic rhythm to the canvas and a perception of time moving on. The effect is simultaneously reminiscent of pixelation in the dissolution of a computer image on the one hand and the manually manipulated placard posters witnessed in the mass rallies of the Cultural Revolution on the other.

In recent months, Ren Hong has swung the focus of her kaleidoscope to more current issues and historic events, and within the context of this exhibition, two of the Olympic Torch series. Once again, they are portraits of ordinary workers standing in front of the ‘Bird’s Nest’ or Olympic Stadium.  A repeated graphic of the controversial Olympic Torch strikes across the canvas. Replacing Mao, the Bird’s Nest is the new icon of Modern China’s achievement and is to house a spectacle of world attention on a scale not seen since the Cultural Revolution.

For Ren Hong in History, there is no wrong or right road, and in crisis, our strengths and weaknesses are recognized, and we realize a common destiny; in a sense, the Cultural Revolution was the catalyst for today. In Ren Hong’s expression and memory of an ideal, there is a recognition of the self as a medium of history and a contribution to humanity.

George Michell
Director & Curator
Studio Rouge
Shanghai

28 May 2008