Mao Xuhui

Hong Kong, Hanart TZ Gallery, Scissors, January 1999, pp. 16-17, illustrated in color

Mao Xuhui is among the leaders of the 1985 New Wave movement. In the 1980s he led a trend from southwest China, called "Torrent of Life" by critics, which was largely expressionistic and went against the ideological art of Beijing. Since the late 1980s Mao has focused his meditations on visual representations of power. The icon of the scissors first emerged in 1991 as a symbolic instrument of the everyday, and gradually came to dominate Mao’s canvases. In the mid-1990s, the scissors image cast itself across domestic scenes and cityscapes, such as the present painting. In 1998 Mao started to paint lone scissors aglow with the aura of religious icons; Mao’s scissors may rightfully be claimed as a major iconic image of Chinese contemporary art in recent years.