Never forget Mao?—The making of a global Icon: a Transcultural Dialogue

Abstract:

How does one become (worthy of) a statue and why? In socialist countries like China, monuments of political icons, strategically placed and landscaped, with ideological and psychological as well as aesthetic considerations, are ubiquitous and universal—they are to be seen everywhere. It would be rare never to have encountered such heroic monumental presence. The statue of the iconic leader is undoubtedly one of the most significant elements in the formal repertories that  artists have developed in their engagement with socialism. Yet, how to deal with the socialist hero once he dies and falls from grace? 

Stalin’s statues are dismantled in a series of dramatic performances, Chiang Kai-shek’s are relegated to large memorial parks. Mao’s, on the other hand, have stayed to grow—in numbers, in size and in material variety and social use—and thus, have become ever more visible, tangible, sensible and tactile than before. 

This talk explores the particular qualities of (post-)Maoist monumentality. I argue that China probably never (can and will) forget Mao, and that this is why artists, writers as well as politicians and the common people—in China as well as abroad—keep fashioning ever new and ever more monumental molds for him. Exploring history, memory and monumental powers in a transcultural dialogue, I will be reflecting on the “Statuomania” or “iconophilia” of “great dictatorships” and “great democracies” alike, reconsidering the iconic monumental not just as “radical style” but as part of a global, if not universal political iconography.

Bio:

Barbara Mittler holds a Chair in Chinese Studies at CATS, the Center for Asian and Transcultural Studies at Heidelberg University which she helped co-found in 2019. For many years, she has co-directed the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies (HCTS, formerly the Cluster of Excellence—Asia and Europe in a Global Context, 2007-2019). She is member of the LEOPOLDINA and the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences.

She began her studies (Sinology, Musicology, Japanese) at Oxford (MA Oxon 1990). Her PhD & Habilitation are from Heidelberg (1994/1998). She has spent time as fellow/visiting professor in Taiwan, the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, at Harvard, Stanford and, most recently, the EHESS in Paris. Her research focuses on the politics of cultural production in (greater) China covering a range of topics from music to visual and historical print media in China’s long modernity.

Among her booklength publications are Dangerous Tunes: The Politics of Chinese Music in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China since 1949, Harrassowitz 1997; A Newspaper for China? Power, Identity and Change in China’s News-Media, 1872-1912, Harvard University Press, 2004; A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture, Harvard University Press, 2012 and Why China did not have a Renaissance and why that matters—an interdisciplinary dialogue (de Gruyter 2018), co-authored with Renaissance Historian Thomas Maissen. She has recently concluded a book-length study on women’s magazines, Portrait(s) of a Trope: Making New Women and New Men in Chinese Women’s Magazines, 1898-2018, and is currently working on a study on music: “And there is only one Lang Lang…”—Chinese Musicians on the Global Stage: a Transcultural Perspective as well as her visual biography of Mao, Reading Mao: The Making of a Global Icon and a book on protest cultures in the sinophone world Do you hear the People Sing? (Un)Silencing and the Art of Protest in China.