In the post-Cultural Revolution era, Chinese artists have been critically engaged with interpreting history and looking forward. Xue Song creates this deliberate cultural discourse between the old and the new through negative space left behind and through the incorporation of charred leftovers from the 1990 fire that burned down his studio and his entire collection of artworks. For Xue Song, the canvas becomes a form of mourning, a remembrance of the past, but also a hope for transcendence and rebirth.

In Mao Zedong, Xue Song appropriates a silhouette of Mao with a mixing of photographs and magazine cutouts. On the inside of the silhouette, burnt black-and-white photos of Mao overlap and overwhelm into this political imagery while on the outside, cartoon magazine cutouts add an element of kitsch and everyday life to the work. Through Xue’s creative composition, this work becomes a cultural discourse between the political and everyday, between the formal and kitsch, between the revolutionary language of Mao and the contemporary consumer cultural language.