Lot 77 email save

Large vase depicting Chairman Mao

Sign In to see what this sold for

the radiating portrait emphasising Mao as the sun, the triple sunflower motif around the shoulder represent the three loyalties to Mao, his thoughts, and the proletarian revolutionary line, the red bandana berries on the neck are an immediate and everlasting visual code of allegiance to Mao's thought, the reverse of the vase inscribed with Mao's poem 'The Double Ninth', and further inscribed "Wish Mao a Long Life", porcelain, 655mm. high, marked and dated, Jiangxi Company of Ceramic Industry, 1968.

***The particularly remarkable aspect of this vase is that Mao's image is painted in under-glaze blue, a high-risk process often resulting in kiln-failure. In choosing to decorate the vase in this way, the maker took an even greater risk of being declared a counter-revolutionary, had Mao's image been marred in any way. The poem on the reverse translates as: Man ages all too easily, not nature; Year by year the Double Ninth returns. On this Double Ninth, The yellow blooms of the battlefield smell sweeter Each year the autumn wind blows strongly, It is not spring's splendour Yet surpasses spring's splendour, The frosty sky and river stretches before the eyes ten thousand miles. This ci poem was written by Mao in October 1929, to commemorate the victory of one of his early guerilla wars at that time. The Double Ninth (Chongyang) refers t othe Chinese autumn festival on the ninth day of the ninth month, according to the Chinese calendar. The poem was first published in the prime literary journal, Renmin Wenxue, in 1962..

View Bloomsbury Auctions next auction.

Similar lots up for auction