Chinese Characters, 2006

67" x 93"

Stenciled, photo silk- screened, commercially available cotton fabrics. Hand and machine appliquéd, machine pieced; hand quilted. Photo credit: Karen Bell.

Collection of John M. Walsh III.

That suit, that hair, that mole: you immediately recognize Chairman Mao. But who--or what--are those pouty women, with their Western features, retro hairdos and dead-eyed stares? They're store mannequins, manufactured in China for the Chinese market, never appearing solo but always arrayed in chorus lines. Perhaps the discordantly comical images have a darker point: if you have that system of government, you get this kind of dehumanized citizen.

Mao's official portrait on Tiananmen--the enormous gate to the Forbidden City--serves as the "establishing shot": the viewer immediately knows that she's in Beijing. Why I felt compelled to combine his face with those store mannequins, I can't say, but they seemed to be everywhere we went, always in a row, and their oddness lodged in my head. They were one of those unexpected details that I'm drawn to when I travel. 

A quote plays out, square by square, across the 'wall'. If you work hard enough at it, you can discover the full quote for yourself:

"China is the worst governed place on earth and has been for thousands of years. There is no such thing as a good emperor or a useful bureaucrat, though the Chinese, idealists to a fault, go on imagining that the next one, the best one, is around the corner or will appear tomorrow. The massacre in Tiananmen is remarkable not because it was unexpected but because it was part of a tedious routine thousands of years old. The Chinese have lived with a boot on their necks through five Egypts, three Romes, and twelve British Empires, and the heel is still ground in for the foreseeable future."

Bill Holm, Coming Home Crazy: An Alphabet of China Essays (Milkweed Editions, 2000)