The Panda Man and the Anti-Counterfeiting Hero: Art, Activism, and Appropriation in Contemporary China
In 1999, a cute and colorful series of posters was seen throughout Beijing’s underground subway system, and soon after, in international art venues from the Guangzhou Triennial to the Venice Biennale. One of the posters depicted the Chinese performance artist, Zhao Bandi, cartoonishly dressed as a detective and protectively clutching a stuffed panda doll (Figure 1). It featured comic-strip style speech bubbles, through which the Little Panda asks, ‘Are they clones of me?’ The detective, gazing wide-eyed through a large magnifying glass, answers, ‘No, they are fakes!’
in Journal of Visual Culture, 11:1, 2012
access via SAGE Publications