Sale of Mao portrait stirs controversy in China

China Travel Services

Beijing - The planned auction of a 55-year-old portrait of former leader Mao Zedong has drawn opposition from thousands of people who believe the picture should be saved for the nation, state media said on Friday.

Opposition has grown since the Huachen auction house announced plans last week to sell the picture, which is a prototype painted by Zhang Zhenshi, the first of four government artists commissioned to paint the portraits that have hung in Beijing's Tiananmen Square since 1950.

'The portrait is worth far more than its monetary value in terms of art and history,' the Shanghai Daily newspaper quoted Chen Lusheng, a researcher at the China National Museum of Fine Arts, as saying.

Thousands of people posted comments opposing the sale on the leading website Sina.com after reports that Huachen plans to include the piece in an auction on June 3, the newspaper said.

The painting, owned by an unnamed Chinese American, is expected to fetch up to 1.2 million yuan (150,000 dollars) at auction, the official China Daily quoted a Huachen employee as saying.

It was the prototype for posters and for the paintings that were displayed on the Tiananmen Rostrum, at the north end of the square, in the 1950s and 1960s.

The portrait is very similar to the one currently hung on the rostrum.

A new picture is reportedly painted every year and replaces the old one before October 1, China's National Day marking the anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949.

The portraits were originally hung only for National Day and May Day celebrations. They became a permanent fixture during the 1966- 1976 Cultural Revolution, though a black and white picture briefly replaced the portrait after Mao's death in 1976.

Ge Xiaoguang, the latest of four artists who have maintained the image, has painted more than 20 giant portraits of the Great Helmsman. Each one reportedly takes about two weeks.

Used portraits are apparently kept in case of more demonstrations like those in 1989, when paint bombs added a touch of Jackson Pollock to Ge's work.