Executed in 1998, Laßt Tausend Blumen Blühen (Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom) delivers a solemn manifestation of Anselm Kiefer's powerful trans-historical dialectic on a monumental scale. Belonging to a body of work which followed the artist’s travels to China in 1993, the present work confronts the legacy of China’s communist regime within a wider mythological and illusory field of Pagan folklore and the Romantic dualism of eternity and transience. Suspended like a deific icon within an expansive textured field, the imposing figure of Mao Zedong presides over a grey landscape peppered by flowers, simultaneously blooming and stark, morbid and overgrown. Inspired by photographs Kiefer took of the colossal propagandist statues that decorate the Chinese capital, the Communist leader appears in the present work as middle-aged and benevolent, his raised arm with thoughtless gesture, the symbolic value of which lies ambiguously between magnanimous wave and Fascist salute.

Including works held in the collects ions of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Tate collects ion, London, Kiefer’s Laßt Tausend Blumen Blühen series calls upon the austere iconography of Mao’s emblematic visage with specific reference to this historic period within the People’s Republic of China, known as the Hundred Flowers Movement, and allusions to Mao’s famous 1957 speech: “Letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy of promoting the progress of the arts and sciences”. Though encouraging freedom of expression and a healthy culture of voiced grievances, Mao’s generous words quickly proved false and the intellectuals who dared to speak out against him were promptly incarcerated. In Laßt Tausend Blumen Blühen, the empty promises and stunted growth of Mao’s ‘hundred flowers’ are conveyed in textured ground of the surrounding environment, more barren than blooming, colliding a wanning revolution with the stymied culture it tyrannically engendered.

Isolated within a seemingly desolate and abandoned blooming field, Mao’s icon is de-contextualised. Beyond the sardonic parody of Warhol’s congruous scrutiny of Mao’s iconicity which began in 1972, Kiefer’s Laßt Tausend Blumen Blühen is constituted by a myriad of symbolic imagery. For the present work, Kiefer’s image invokes the flower-maidens of Ancient Greece, the myth of Persephone – snatched by Hades and dragged to the underworld while gathering her blooms – and the dualistic symbolism of beauty and decay embedded within vanitas. In the ragged brushwork of Kiefer’s painterly manner, the image remembers Van Gogh’s psychologically charged landscapes in their deeply furrowed and impastoed rural depiction for Arles. As Thomas McEvilley writes of Kiefer’s series, he “has incorporated [Mao] into a different and more complicated spirituality that contains elements Mao himself probably would not have approved of” (Thomas McEvilley, “Let a Thousand flowers Bloom” in: Exh. Cat., London, Anthony d’Offay Gallery, Anselm Kiefer: Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom, 2000, p. 18).

Directing critical attention to Mao Zedong and the Cultural revolution, Laßt Tausend Blumen Blühen echoes the artist’s intrepid scrutiny of Germany’s Nazi heritage in the theatrical and subversive series Occupations. Confronting a national sense of inherited cultural trauma, for Occupations Kiefer photographed himself in military regalia, positioned in front of various European landmarks and locations, critically re-enacting the notorious Fascist salute. Recreating Kiefer’s bold artistic stat.mes nt and its infamous gesture, the present work and the series to which it belongs is less imprisoned by the need to work through a kind of cultural penance. Immersing the viewer in a complex matrix of signifiers, alchemically and morally balanced between good and evil, Laßt Tausend Blumen Blühen dissolves historical and cultural boundaries to hint at the linkages between the deepest reaches of myth and the most sensitive and recent of collects ive traumas.

Detached from a sense of native immediacy, Laßt Tausend Blumen Blühen employs the symbolic value of Mao as a vehicle through which East.mes ets West, and myriad strands of mythological, cultural and historical dialogues are interwoven. Overlaying Ancient Greek myth, Romantic concepts of heaven and earth, and Rosicrucian mysticism onto Mao’s displaced and free-floating iconicity, Laßt Tausend Blumen Blühen is enhanced by Kiefer’s expansive intellectual and art historical lexicon. An atemporal and dreamlike universal response to sacrifice, suffering and loss, Laßt Tausend Blumen Blühen uniquely conflates China’s brutal communist regime with a host of archaic referents, imploring the present viewer to deconstruct and unravel a complex yet gloriously poetic painterly topography.