Beijing Escorts: Guilty Conscience
CHINESE CULTURE: Artists Gao Qiang and Gao Zhen lost their father to China’s Cultural Revolution, and their work is an attempt to get China to face up to its difficult past and the truth behind its most famous leader, Mao Zedong, writes CLIFFORD COONAN in Beijing
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It’s not all about Mao, and they do a lot of other great work, but it’s the work about the chairman, who died in 1976, that stands out. In one of the brothers’ most accomplished pieces, The Forever Unfinished Building No 4, there are images of migrant workers, prostitutes, dissidents, Kim Jong-il, police, Nazis, Porsches, Olympic stars, astronauts – basically all the components of the ongoing dialogue about China’s metamorphosis, executed in the style of Antoni Gaudí and Jeff Koons, with a splash of Jake and Dinos Chapman.
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Another striking series is based on news photographs of a raid on a brothel. One of the key pieces in this series, To Catch a Lady , was confiscated by police who broke into their studio, and only returned after the brothers filed a complaint. In another exhibition in 2006, government officials came in with a list of work that had to go.
See the full article from “Irish Times”