On the same day as our experience in Tiananmen, where Mao is insultingly preserved like some pharaoh buried with his slaves, we watched a teen at Mao nightclub plugged into a Marshall stack tuning as he glanced at the parodic, iconographic reduction of that dictator’s hair -as though Hitler’s mustache were used to market cola. Such recontextualization is powerful to see in a land where the dictator’s portrait still hangs, the reclamation of his name and image a proof of the inevitability of change.
