Easter Contribution: Dürer Overwritten with a Mao Slogan

“Christus am Kreuz” and a Mao Slogan

For Easter 2021, I painted a Mao slogan across an old reproduction of Christus am Kreuz—Christ on the Cross. The print names Albrecht Dürer, although the Dresden museum now catalogues the underlying painting more cautiously as “in the manner of (?)” Dürer, dating it to the sixteenth century.^[1] My intervention is on the reproduction, not on the original panel.

The green writing crosses Christ’s body and the dark space around the cross. Its colour is almost startling against the brown image. The letters already printed above the scene identify a religious subject; the Chinese characters introduce a second voice, one that belongs to political instruction.

A Slogan About Publishing

The inscription reads 认真作好出版工作: “Do the publishing work seriously.” Mao wrote this instruction for the national Xinhua Bookstore publishing conference in 1949.^[2] Here, its apparently practical wording sits over an image of suffering and sacrifice.

When I made the work in March 2021, I was thinking about what I saw as a revival of Mao in Chinese public life, and about the role of media campaigns in presenting the West as an enemy. The slogan was therefore a deliberate choice. I read it as a pointed address to the people shaping public opinion: publishing is also a way of deciding which images and ideas people encounter.

The combination may seem confusing at first, and I hope the work can hold its own without this explanation. The Christian image and Mao’s writing carry very different histories. On this small sheet, neither disappears. What happens when an instruction about publishing is placed across a body that has already become an image of belief?

---

Footnotes

[1] Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden: Christus am Kreuz, Gal.-Nr. 1870. The catalogue lists oil on limewood, 20 × 16 cm, sixteenth century, and discusses the disputed attribution. ↩

[2] Yunnan provincial publicity department: publishing and printing in the history of the Party, 2021 (Chinese), on Mao’s October 1949 inscription. ↩

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