Mao Songs

Mark Harris
Beijing, 2005

　　Thirty-five Beijing musicians were invited to sing a selection from Mao Zedong’s Long March poems. They were asked to sing the poem in whatever musical idiom they normally use. Each performance was videotaped.

　　The invited performers represented a wide range of musicians. They included traditional folk musicians from Tiantan and Jingshan Parks, pop and karaoke singers from the bars in Hou Hai, street musicians from Dongzhimen, Xidan and Dongsishitiao subways, and rock-and-roll vocalists from clubs like Yu Gong Yi Shan and Nameless Highland. Where possible, the performers have been filmed on location.

　　I was surprised to find Beijing filled with music. It blasts out of the CD shops on every street, and from every bar in Hou Hai where from the street you can hear several performers simultaneously. In the parks the same traditional musicians play daily for their own pleasure. In Tiantan Park they sit so near each other that their own playing intermingles with their neighbours’ music. Thinking of how this phenomenon could be documented, I introduced Mao’s poems to link the performances and to complicate them.

　　The proximity of their performers makes the various communities formed by Beijing musicians more visible. Some of the street musicians play together, are visited by their friends and appreciated by the security guards and vendors in the subways. The experimental musicians promote each other’s music by releasing CDs and organizing joint performances around a small circuit of clubs. Even if their mandate is economic, the Hou Hai musicians form an especially large collective of inventive interpreters and composers who are key in converting that lakeside strip into the mirage of an urban utopia.

　　The high visibility of these Beijing music communities makes their utopian impulse more apparent. All musical performance brings about a momentary utopian experience. To experience music is to glimpse a better world. Furtheremore, in their informal collectives musicians design temporary models of utopian communities and long after these groups have dissolved, their music provides evidence of what might have been possible. The intention of linking these musicians to Mao’s poems is to join a contemporary utopian project with a historical one. Describing an intense immersion in nature, Mao issues a revolutionary call as if linking this enjoyment of the landscape with its defense. The combination in Mao’s productionist poems of revolutionary demands with insistence on the value of sensory pleasures recalls other Socialist literature, and in particular, Surrealist writing. The Surrealists held up the city as the marvellous nature that social revolution would make accessible to others. Mao also seems to say that the transformation of the individual through experience of nature has to be part of the larger revolutionary programme of social reorganisation. In this sense he is proposing a utopian project that remained part of the content of his grand social engineering failures like The Great Leap Forward and The Cultural Revolution which bound successful social transformation to the idea that inherent values lay in agrarian life.

　　The poems used for this project (“Huichang”, “Loushan Pass”,“Three Short Poems”,“The Long March”, “Mount Liupan”, and “Snow”) were written between 1934-36, predating the foundation of the Communist State. The future that they call for is not the one that came about. Musicians have had very different responses to the invitation. Some felt uneasy on account of the misfortune their families experienced during the Cultural Revolution. Others knew some of the poems from their youth and felt comfortable with them. Some have wondered at the appropriateness of a foreigner questioning Chinese on this crucial history, insisting that Mao’s position in contemporary China is so complex that people feel deeply ambivalent towards him. I hoped the project would reveal some of this complexity, especially in view of the one-dimensional image Mao has with most Westerners. While addressing Mao’s reputation as a great statesman and artist (he was a celebrated poet and calligrapher), the project also invites speculation on the wide range of feelings he arouses amongst contemporary Chinese, and of course on the limitations of a Westerner in trying to understand these feelings.


Spot work made by the artist