ism can now safely be reinvented for popular and élite consumption. Madonna titillates her audiences with naughty evocations of Catholic symbols, ones that are culturally powerful and commercially exploitable. Political parody in China works in a similar fashion. Things might be very differentand dangerousif Deng Xiaoping was the icon being given the Warhol treatment."
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Political Pop is a genre that developed and spread throughout the socialist world from the late 1970s through to the early 1990s. Combining the commercial dimension of Western Pop with the political icons of socialism, it resulted in works rich in a particular style of humor and absurdity. Political Pop can also be seen as emblematic of the late cold war period, a manifestation of the egregious absurdity artists felt as Western commercial culture infiltrated the socialist bloc.
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In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Czech artist Milán Kunc and the Soviet artists Alexander Kosolapov and Leonid Bohov began creating Political Pop at roughly the same time. In their works they utilized Western consumer icons like Coca Cola as part of a humorous representation of communist icons like Lenin, Stalin, and the hammer and sickle.
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It was not until the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, that Political Pop made its first appearance in China. Unlike the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Political Pop in China was not part of a movement aimed at desecrating political leaders; rather, it evolved at a time when a mass revival of the MaoCraze was sweeping the nation.
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In 1991-92, numerous Cultural Revolution-period songs glorifying Mao were re-recorded and released, large numbers of books related to Mao were published, Mao badges made a reappearance, and Mao portraits were printed on T-shirts, and a range of other products. There was, I would argue, a more complex mass mentality at work in the history of Political Pop in China than we have seen in either the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe. The MaoCraze of the early 1990s reflected a "Mao obsession" that still haunted the popular psyche. It is an obsession that combined both a nostalgia for the simpler, less corrupt, and more self-assured period of Mao's rule with a desire to appropriate Mao Zedong, the paramount God of the past, in ventures satirizing life and politics in contemporary China. This satirical spirit was something that was also reflected in the Student Demonstrations of 1989, particularly notable when demonstrators surrounded the police and the army and sang revolutionary songs at them. Both instances, that is, of the students in 1989 and the popular appropriation of Mao thereafter, are an expression of a typical style of Chinese irony, a temper and form of expression that has evolved among people who have lived for so many years
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