Creating and Discarding Symbols: The Case of Mao Zedong’s Golden Mangoes

The Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University presents a talk "Creating and Discarding Symbols: The Case of Mao Zedong's Golden Mangoes" by Alfreda Murck Monday, September 22, 2014, 4:00pm to 5:30pm.

In 1968, during China’s “Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution,” the cult of Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong was at a high. A Pakistani foreign minister presented Mao with a crate of mangoes that he re-gifted to the Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams who were occupying the Tsinghua University campus. The gift of mangoes happened to coincide with a shift in the leadership of the Cultural Revolution from students to the military under the guise of the working class. Alfreda Murck will tell the story of the improbable transformation of the mango from then unknown fruit to a symbol of Mao’s love for workers and its consignment to the dustbin of history.

An historian of Chinese visual culture, Alfreda Murck  lived  in Taipei and Beijing for 20 years. In China, she worked at the Palace Museum and taught at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and Peking University. She contributed to exhibitions such as The Three Emperors, 1662-1795 at the Royal Academy, London; Eccentric Visions: The Worlds of Luo Ping (1733-1799) at the Museum Rietberg, Zürich, and the Metropolitan Museum; Mao’s Golden Mangoes and the Cultural Revolution, also at the Museum Rietberg; and this autumn at the China Institute in New York. Besides numerous articles, Murck is the author of  the book Poetry and Painting in Song China: The Subtle Art of Dissent (2000). Prior to living in Asia, Murck was Associate Curator of Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum. She received her PhD from Princeton University.