Who Is Mao Looking At?

Who Is Mao Looking At? Looking with and Looking Back at Mao-An Interactive Exhibition on Gaze, Memory, and History

This event is an interactive anthropological exhibition exploring how the image of Mao Zedong continues to shape emotional life, memory, and historical imagination across different cultural and geographical contexts.

Rather than presenting Mao as a fixed historical figure, the exhibition focuses on gaze as a relational concept: how Mao has been visually produced to look at “the people,” how individuals imagine themselves as being seen by Mao, and how contemporary audiences look back at Mao through practices of reuse, reenactment, and consumption.

The exhibition unfolds in three interconnected sections. The first introduces how Mao’s gaze was historically constructed and circulated through portraits, propaganda, and everyday visual culture, using a selection of archival images and short video material. The second section embeds a small camera inside the eyes of a Mao statue, inviting visitors to experience, in a direct way, how they look at Mao and how they are seen under Mao’s gaze—to see themselves “in Mao’s eyes.” The third section, we will invite participants to reflect on how political icons are reworked, performed, and negotiated in the present. We will build a small photo area with a Tiananmen-style backdrop and Mao’s portrait above, where visitors can step in to take photographs using selected props.

The event encourages visitors to reflect on their own position within histories of power, memory, and visual authority. The exhibition speaks to broader questions about how political images endure beyond their original contexts and how people form emotional relationships with historical figures in everyday life.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Chrystal Macmillan Building, The University of Edinburgh, 15a George Square, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

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