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The Reconstruction of a Political Icon: Shi Lu’s Painting Fighting in Northern Shaanxi

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

As an instance of semiotic interpretation of political art, this article rereads a painting created during the 1950s by Shi Lu that depicts the Chinese Communist leader, Mao Zedong. The author identifies the artist’s visual references to traditional Chinese landscape painting and the embodied traditional values, differentiates the work from the popular revolutionary art style of the same age, and argues that this act of referencing problematizes the dominant ideology in a politically highly charged historical context by reconstructing the commonly depicted political icon Mao through dislocated style and scale. The interpretation demonstrates how signifiers both in the forms of text and memory can interfere with current cultural drive and rename the signified through subtle variations.

Key Words: revolutionary art • Chinese traditional landscape painting • political icon • Mao Zedong • semiotics

Qualitative Inquiry, Vol. 11, No. 4, 535-548 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/1077800405276766


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