Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. You think you know everything about contemporary Chinese art because you’ve read two articles online and bought an auction catalog from Christie’s? Let me tell you about Mao Xuhui (born in 1956 in Chongqing), an artist who doesn’t need your Western validation to exist.
While some gush over digital works as empty as their wallets, Mao Xuhui has spent four decades dissecting authority and nature with the precision of a surgeon and the fury of a Nietzsche on acid. Don’t expect quaint pastoral landscapes to decorate your bourgeois living rooms.
Let’s start with his “Scissors” and “Parents” series, where he transforms scissors and parental figures into sharp metaphors of power. These works are not there to look pretty above your Italian leather sofa. Mao Xuhui takes the concept of authority and cuts it into pieces, like Lucio Fontana slashing his canvases, but with a political dimension that would make Foucault shudder in his grave. The scissors, obsessively present in his work since the 1990s, are not mere sewing tools. They are instruments of social dissection, scalpels that lay bare the mechanisms of power in post-Tiananmen Chinese society.
When he painted “Parents Sitting on Chairs” in 1988, it wasn’t a Sunday family portrait. It was an allegory of power that makes Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X look as harmless as a toothpaste commercial. The parental figure becomes a vehicle to explore what Deleuze called “societies of control.” The chairs are no longer simple furniture but dystopian thrones, seats of power recalling the mechanisms of domination analyzed by Walter Benjamin in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History”.
But wait, there’s more. Let’s talk about his “Guishan” series, where he transforms a Yunnan landscape into an existential battlefield. Unlike those artists who paint nature as tourist postcards, Mao Xuhui sees it as a spiritual territory where the drama of Chinese modernization unfolds. The red earth of Guishan is not just a pretty setting—it’s a manifesto against the rampant industrialization ravaging China, a meditation on what Heidegger called the “uprooting of being”.
In “Guishan Dreams – Camouflage”, he overlays his iconic camouflaged scissors onto the landscape as a biting commentary on the violence inflicted on nature. It’s Caspar David Friedrich meets Joseph Beuys in a post-apocalyptic karaoke bar. The diagonal composition creates a tension that makes Kandinsky’s abstractions seem as calm as a pond on a still day.
Mao Xuhui transforms everyday objects into ticking philosophical time bombs. His scissors don’t just cut paper—they slash through our intellectual complacency. His Guishan mountain isn’t just a geographical relief—it’s a monument to resistance against cultural homogenization. As Theodor Adorno wrote, “Art does not reflect society; it accuses it”. And Mao Xuhui is an unrelenting prosecutor.
What’s fascinating is his ability to navigate between Expressionism and Symbolism without falling into the trap of didactic political art. Unlike those artists who think raising a fist in a painting makes it politically engaged, Mao Xuhui understands that true subversion lies as much in form as in content. His violent brushstrokes in the “Parents” series evoke the gestural power of Willem de Kooning but with a psychological depth akin to Louise Bourgeois dissecting her familial traumas.
In the 1980s, while the West was enamored with Neo-Expressionism, Mao Xuhui was creating a visual language that transcended easy labels. His Southwest Art Research Group didn’t aim to mimic Western trends but to forge a new path that integrated Chinese cultural heritage while confronting modern challenges. It was Kafka meeting the Tao in a feverish dream of Francis Bacon.
Even his painting technique is an act of resistance. When “Political Pop” dominated the Chinese art scene in the 1990s with its slick, commercial aesthetic, Mao Xuhui doubled down on the materiality of painting. His tormented surfaces are battlefields where the conflict between tradition and modernity, individual and authority, plays out. Every brushstroke is an act of defiance against cultural homogenization.
The final works in his “Guishan” series are particularly poignant. The landscape becomes a canvas where layers of history, memory, and loss converge. It’s as if Giorgio Morandi decided to paint not still lifes but the death of nature itself. The apparent simplicity of these compositions hides a complexity that would bring Roland Barthes to tears over the impossibility of representation.
Mao Xuhui is not an artist who seeks to please. He doesn’t create art for speculative investments or compulsive collectors. His work is a mirror held up to a society in flux, where power changes forms but not its nature. As Walter Benjamin wrote, “There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”. Mao Xuhui’s scissors cut through this very dialectic.
And you know what? While some marvel at interactive installations that interact only with their egos, Mao Xuhui continues to paint with the urgency of a man who knows art can still make a difference—not by serving as decoration for your cocktail parties, but by breaking open the walls of our collective complacency.
His art reminds us that painting is not dead—it has just become more dangerous than ever. In a world where everything is digitized, quantified, monetized, Mao Xuhui’s pictorial gesture remains an act of pure resistance. His scissors don’t just cut the canvas—they shred our certainties about what contemporary Chinese art should be.
So the next time you think you know everything about contemporary Chinese art, first look at a work by Mao Xuhui. And if you don’t feel the existential vertigo it provokes, maybe you’re already too anesthetized by the art market’s noise to understand that a true artist doesn’t aim to comfort you, but to wake you up.
