Art: Imagining the Chairman

THE sculpture (by Sui Jianguo) squats, a weird piece of a whole that was never made, on a median bisecting one of the more affluent slices of Manhattan’s Park Avenue. It’s of a distinctive, very distinctive, jacket, nothing more, but it’s oddly bulky, as if the colossus who once wore it were, impossibly, somewhere within. And because the shape and the cut of that jacket are so distinctive, the onlooker is encouraged to fill it with his own image of the only individual (out of hundreds of millions once clothed in such garments) it could possibly represent. He’s a man (“monster” is too easy an alibi for you and for me) whose deeds heaped further disgrace on an already savage century, yet who now finds himself with a place in the collective imagination that is strangely, and disquietingly, ambivalent.

If, on the other hand, you’re just puzzled by the sight of an oversized piece of metal tailoring in the middle of Park Avenue, glance across at the building that houses the Asia Society. A banner emblazoned with Chairman Mao-ah, that’s whose jacket it is-flutters, advertising the society’s latest exhibition. Art and China’s Revolution is a remarkable collection (it runs until January 11) of works dating mainly from the first three decades of the People’s Republic. To see it is to be left in little doubt about the nature of the man in that jacket.

About the Author

Andrew Stuttaford

Andrew Stuttaford is the editor of National Review's Capital Matters.

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THE sculpture (by Sui Jianguo) squats, a weird piece of a whole that was never made, on a median bisecting one of the more affluent slices of Manhattan’s Park Avenue. It’s of a distinctive, very distinctive, jacket, nothing more, but it’s oddly bulky, as if the colossus who once wore it were, impossibly, somewhere within. And because the shape and the cut of that jacket are so distinctive, the onlooker is encouraged to fill it with his own image of the only individual (out of hundreds of millions once clothed in such garments) it could possibly represent. He’s a man (“monster” is too easy an alibi for you and for me) whose deeds heaped further disgrace on an already savage century, yet who now finds himself with a place in the collective imagination that is strangely, and disquietingly, ambivalent.

If, on the other hand, you’re just puzzled by the sight of an oversized piece of metal tailoring in the middle of Park Avenue, glance across at the building that houses the Asia Society. A banner emblazoned with Chairman Mao-ah, that’s whose jacket it is-flutters, advertising the society’s latest exhibition. Art and China’s Revolution is a remarkable collection (it runs until January 11) of works dating mainly from the first three decades of the People’s Republic. To see it is to be left in little doubt about the nature of the man in that jacket.