MAO, Zedong.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Mao zhuxi wan sui! ("Long Live Chairman Mao!") A large, well-preserved poster produced early in the Cultural Revolution to stoke the revolutionary fires of Mao's burgeoning cult. The portrait mirrors the contemporary official portrait of Mao that hung overlooking Tiananmen Square, and it is accompanied by the slogans that quickly became the standard adulation for Mao after the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.Under the Chinese Communist Party, portraits of state leaders have always been a tightly-controlled visual genre. Mao had a number of official portraits made during his lifetime, with the version on this poster being the seventh authorised portrait commissioned after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. The depiction, painted by the artist Wang Guodong, came into use in 1964 and, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, the Party's Politburo decided to make the hanging of a Mao portrait on the Tiananmen rostrum permanent for the first time.In essence, this decision legitimised the mass dissemination of Mao's image in poster form and his cult of personality quickly ballooned. With one's loyalty to Mao judged by outward, performative demonstrations of fealty, the hanging of a Mao poster was a way for ordinary people to survive the political radicalism of the Cultural Revolution, and publishers and printers around the country produced tens of millions of copies to feed growing demand. This copy was printed in Shanghai on high-quality paper

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