“I went to see the Great Wall. You know, you read about it for years. And actually, it was really great. It was really, really, really great.”
That was Andy Warhol after his only visit to China, in 1982.
He loved what he saw. He loved, he said, that everyone here dressed alike. He loved that the Great Wall, the world’s biggest Private Property: Do Not Enter sign, was in a Communist country. He loved that Mao Zedong (毛澤東), whose face he had painted because Life magazine called Mao the most famous man in the world, was still a superstar even though he had been dead for six years.
China was Pop. It still is. It’s still a nation of uniforms, but of more and more kinds of uniforms. I saw outfits with matching corsages on department store salesgirls, the slate-gray shirts of guards stationed at luxury high-rises and the Chloe Sevigny T-shirts that teenagers wear on Beijing streets. Mao’s image is less conspicuous here than it once was. His status took a dip when the savageries of the Cultural Revolution began to be told. His face doesn’t appear on a new 10 yuan banknote issued for the Olympics, but it’s on all other currency above the small-change level. He remains omnipresent, like some Warholian multiple. Look and you’ll find him. His star power holds.
And there’s advertising on top of advertising. Next to the stretch of the Great Wall that Warhol visited — actually a modern reconstruction, fake history — there now stands a large billboard emblazoned with the Olympic slogan, “One World One Dream.” It simultaneously promotes an image of the New China and interrupts a view of the old one, a vista of a romantic landscape that has been kept, for travel-brochure purposes, development free.
Warhol knew all about new-old. He didn’t paint Campbell’s soup cans because they were so cool and 1960s but because they were homely and 1930s, relics of his Depression-era childhood. He would have grasped in a flash that there’s something very old right in the center of the splashy new Beijing: a cemetery, a symbolic one but a cemetery nonetheless.
It has three parts: Mao’s mausoleum, where he lies in state; the Forbidden City, where the nation’s imperial past is embalmed; and, between them, Tiananmen Square, where the ghosts of a still-recent political trauma, the 1989 massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators, find no rest.
Of course Warhol had himself photographed with the Mao portrait in Tiananmen. Whether he toured Mao’s mausoleum — officially the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall (毛主席紀念堂) — I don’t know. I knew I wanted to go. The problem was finding a companion. Several expatriate contacts begged off. None of them, it seemed, had ever made a visit, and they wondered why I would want to.
I tried to explain that, with my interests in popular culture, popular religion, power politics and the mechanics of propaganda, not to mention Pop Art and Chinese history past and present, the mausoleum was a must-see. Doubtful glances. Finally a young art consultant and translator named Megan Connolly, a native New Yorker living in Beijing, agreed to go. Warning me wryly that she had never been to the Statue of Liberty, she booked a car for an early morning pickup.
Our driver, Yang Jie, was a find. In her mid-30s, she reminded me of Diana Rigg as Emma Peel in The Avengers. Driving her own SUV, she handled traffic as one imagines Emma might, with bold but diffident grace. Firm of opinion, up on the news, she was an utterly cosmopolitan person, although she spoke only Chinese and had seldom left Beijing.
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