On February 5, 1989, Wang Guangyi’s Mao AO sparked perhaps the most critical controversy in contemporary Chinese art history. Widely known as the painting of “Mao behind bars,” Mao AO is a triptych composed of three near-identical images of the Great Helmsman overlaid with a thick black grid. This formidable grid formed the literal framework for a rational analysis of the picture plane; it also unthinkably implied Mao’s imprisonment or, at the very least, an insurmountable barrier between his revered image and the gaze of the worshipful masses. Wang added the letters A and O, cryptically, in alternate corners of each triptych panel. According to the artist, the letters represent nothing more than coordinates in a random system, much like the ticker-tape flurry of numbers stamped across his Great Criticism paintings.

For more than two decades Mao Zedong’s portrait was ubiquitous throughout China. The official emblem of the Great Leader’s cult of personality, Mao’s image presided over schools, factories, committee halls, and, of course, Tiananmen Square. The first Mao portrait appeared in Tiananmen Square in 1949, replacing Chiang Kai-shek’s after the Communists seized power and founded the People’s Republic of China. In the intervening years, several versions of Mao’s visage presided over Tiananmen, each executed by the then-reigning official portrait maker with the help of anonymous artists. Even today, Mao’s portrait remains above Tiananmen as the figurehead that unites the Communist Party and the People’s Republic of China. Despite his mixed legacy, his image serves as a powerful touchstone for millions of Chinese citizens.

Wang Guangyi was born in Harbin in 1957 and graduated from the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts’ highly competitive oil painting department. Thereafter, he founded the highly influential Northern Art Group. The group’s rational philosophy, as well as their northern origins, was manifested in their art’s cool tones and geometrically precise imagery, including Wang Guangyi’s seminal “Post Classical” and “Frozen Northern Wastelands” series (Lots x and y). Wang’s manifesto was qingli renwen reqing—rationality in art was supreme, emotion to be expunged.

Wang’s appropriation of classical imagery, overlaid with a floating coordinate and grid system, first tackled subjects from Western religious and artistic masterpieces such as Post-Classical Series: Madonna and Child (Lot x), and Death of Marat. It would take a quintessentially Chinese image, however, to catalyze the simmering tensions between Wang’s method and his chosen subject. “How to take an icon or idol and negate all the human emotion it inspired? The original portraits had accorded the masses the same access to Mao as altarpieces provide the faithful to Jesus.” (K. Smith, Nine Lives: the Birth of Avant-Garde Art, Zurich, 2005, p. 55) Could a mere grid really cut loose the intense emotional and ideological bonds that tied millions of Chinese citizens to Mao’s image?

Mao AO set off a frenzy from the moment curator Li Xianting placed the work prominently in the center of the National Art Gallery as part of the radical China Avant-Garde exhibition of 1989. Wang’s work not only caused a sensation among the art community and nervous officials, but also aroused unprecedented emotions in the general populace. Witness this comment about Mao AO in the Peasants’ Daily:

“Maybe this grid is a kind of railing. For so many years we said that Mao Zedong was our most intimate relative, or something like that. So close to us. Maybe this railing is to separate us from him. In fact, this is all untrue, and he concealed something. Why paint three paintings? This makes one feel that the traces of this formerly noble personality can now be found everywhere.” (Peasants’ Daily, February 1989, quoted in M. Koppel-Yang, Semiotic Warfare, p. 161)

Barely hours after China Avant/Garde opened, the authorities closed down the exhibition when the artist Xiao Lu fired a pistol into her installation Dialogue. China Avant/Garde was not reopened until February 10. In order to have Mao AO redisplayed, Wang had to sign a declaration stating that his work was a rational analysis of the Great Leader. His statement (which was actually written by Gao Minglu, and translated into English by Hou Hanru) read: “A great figure should obtain an objective and earnest evaluation.” Not entirely satisfied, the authorities then leveled the charge that the “A” and “O” recalled the current joke “I am not AQ, I am AO.” In response, Wang painted over the right side of the “Os” and turned them into “Cs.”

As is true of any masterpiece of contemporary art history, critics read the intent and impact of Mao AO in several different ways. Wu Hung suggests that Wang, as a rationalist, sought to liberate the visual image from its political and cultural identity: “the surface grid and letters—signs of non-pictorial kinds—distance the viewer from the images; and the multiplicity of the copies destroys the singularity of a sacred icon… What he intended to achieve was therefore to get rid of the ideology associated with the portrait, thereby reinstalling its status as a sheer image.” (H. Wu, Remaking Beijing, Chicago, 2005, p. 185). By contrast, Lu Peng did not perceive the rational approach as an unequivocal success: “Mao (AO) is the culmination of Wang Guangyi’s rationalism. The dissociation between the pure grid and the form, full of humanism, could not more clearly expose the artist’s internal conflict—rationality’s oppression of the humanist spirit.” (P. Lu, “Contemporary Chinese Art Selections: Wang Guangyi,” Wang Guangyi: Art and People, Sichuan, 2006) Martina Koppel-Yang saw Mao AO as the postmodern appropriation of a historical icon, “(evoking) Andy Warhol’s portraits of superstars. Wang Guangyi’s interest in American pop art, in particular Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, is also evident in the assimilation of current interest (here Mao Fever) into the domain of contemporary art, as well as in the use of derived signs.” (M. Koppel-Yang, Semiotic Warfare: The Chinese Avant-Garde, 1979-89, A Semiotic Analysis, Beijing, 2002, p. 160)

In 2007, Mao AO remains as much of a tour de force as when it was first exhibited almost two decades ago. Its deep-rooted political and cultural commentary—not to mention its unprecedented formal qualities—have heavily influenced a generation of Chinese artists. It is not without irony that the image of “Mao behind bars” should serve as the proverbial key that conceptually opened not one, but an entire myriad of doors for avant-garde Chinese art in the twenty-first century.