The Inheritance of Post-Maoism

By: Madeline Heller

This paper examines how contemporary Sinophone artists give form to the psychological inheritance of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), a rupture whose trauma continues to shape family life, memory, and identity in post-socialist China. Where official narratives treat Maoism as a closed chapter, these artists reveal how political violence quietly embeds itself in domestic settings, family structures, and the body itself.

Through a comparative reading of Zhang Xiaogang, Song Dong, and He Chengyao, it argues that medium is not incidental but constitutive: each artist’s chosen form (painting, installation, performance) structures a distinct way of remembering and transmitting inherited trauma.

Zhang Xiaogang, from the ‘Bloodline: Big Family’ series — a grey-toned family portrait of two adults in dark Mao-era dress with a red-faced child, linked by thin red threads.
Bloodline, Family No. 1, 1993, Collection of Tokushima Modern Art Museum, Japan. Source: Sotheby’s.

Zhang Xiaogang’s Bloodline family portraits use repetition and a cool, photographic distance to render trauma as something quietly and endlessly reproduced across generations. Song Dong’s autobiographical installations achieve intimacy through physical engagement with family objects, while He Chengyao’s performance work locates that same history directly in the artist’s own body.

Drawing on scholarship in cultural memory and affect, the paper shows how these practices move beyond straightforward historical representation toward embodied testimony, laying bare trauma as a defining condition of post-Mao subjectivity, and connecting individual sensation to collective experience.

Gallery installation: a weathered wooden house frame surrounded by thousands of everyday household objects (clothing, shoes, bottles, boxes, and utensils) laid out in neat rows across the floor as visitors walk among them.
Figure 7. Song Dong, Waste Not, 2005, materials and dimensions variable (Exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2006; photo: Andrew Russeth, CC BY-SA 2.0) © Song Dong. Source: Smarthistory
A Sony video cassette with handwritten Chinese labels dated 2002.8.17, resting on a dark surface.
Song Dong. Touching My Father. 1997–2011. Part II. Video installation. (Three Parts) Source: WordPress.
Performance documentation: the artist walks bare-chested up a long flight of steps lined with columns of crushed, multicoloured cans and debris, with other people following behind.
He Chengyao, Opening the Great Wall, 2001, performance, Courtesy of the artist. Source: awarewomenartist.com.
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