This sculpture called “China China” is now decorating our local airport. My reading of the sculpture is that all Chinese people are the same. And that’s disturbing.
China China
Opinions, art, debate
Opinions, art, debate
This sculpture called “China China” is now decorating our local airport. My reading of the sculpture is that all Chinese people are the same. And that’s disturbing.
Clarissa's Blog 
I find the sculpture disturbing on its own divorced of title or whatever it’s supposed to represent.
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I don’t see much. Are there two bald men performing anal sex on one another?
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What’s the story behind why the sculpture is there?
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It kind of looks like a ripoff of the Gao Brothers’ artwork…
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Which means that it’s called “China China” because it’s a cloned product?
Cheeky.
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After a close inspection, we discovered that the statues had slightly different shoes. Which didn’t make the whole thing any better.
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My reading of it is that “thank G-d, that thing is off our block” – I think this was on the corner of Maryland and Euclid for a while. I never knew it had a name, thought it was sufficiently uninteresting to never bother looking for a name. I prefer the giant wooden chess queen myself (decoration for the chess museum on the same intersection).
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I KNEW I HAD SEEN IT SOMEWHERE!!! Good to know I’m not delusional because this has been haunting me.
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Interesting story behind this – a St. Louis nonprofit organization by the name of the Gateway Foundation donated the sculpture for ten years to the airport authority. This company provides alcohol and drug counseling to prison inmates. Lots of growth potential in this area especially after the events in Ferguson. If Chinese goods are good enough for Walmart then they’re good enough for the public arena! They certainly seem to get all the good jobs. Consider the Martin Luther King Jr. sculpture on the Washington D.C. National Mall by Lei Yixin which bears a remarkable resemblance to his prior Mao works in China. I wonder if he repurposed a left over Mao statue.
The artist is a Chinese man, Zhu Wei (朱偉︱朱伟), who specializes in transgressive art. He started his career doing propaganda art for the government but did subtle subversive forms after the events in Tiananmen Square. The men in the statue have been suggested to represent obedient political cadres in Mao style jackets – a certain level of ambiguity is required to avoid imprisonment like the more daring artist Ai Wei Wei in current China.
Whenever I hear about transgressive art, I always think about the Irish artist, Francis Bacon’s reimagining of Diego Velázquez’s 1650 portrait of Pope Innocent X although this is definitely not a subtle re-interpretation. Do societies in transition give rise to this art form and are artists the heralds of some new dystopia?
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Fascinating! But these obedient political cadres evoke all kinds of disturbing associations at an American airport. And the inmate connection makes the whole thing even more bizarre. We live in a complex and weird world.
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