Andy Goes to China

Photo by Christopher Makos

The contents of a duffel bag brought home by Makos from China in 1982 and opened in July 2008

Robert Rauschenberg Andy Warhol Jasper Johns Roy Lichtenstein Jean-Michel Basquiat James Rosenquist Christopher Makos Julian Schnabel

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In 1982, Warhol visited the land of Mao, with photographer Christopher Makos in tow. The pictures he took document a historic moment of cultural exchange.

In 1982, Andy Warhol visited Peking—today’s Beijing—for the first and only time. Though he was at the height of his fame in his home country, the 54-year-old artist was virtually unknown in the People’s Republic of China, which had reactivated its Open Door policy only a few years earlier. In Warhol’s always-crowded entourage were Christopher Makos, then working as an Interview magazine photographer; Fred Hughes, Warhol’s flamboyant Texan manager; Hughes’s girlfriend, the English aristocrat Natasha Grenfell; and the documentary maker Lee Caplin with a small film crew. “Andy was the sort of front man of the band,” Makos noted, “and we were the backup singers.”

Warhol’s trip was an important moment of cultural exchange, a brief chapter that seems all the more interesting today. In recent years, artists in China have looked back at the era of the Cultural Revolution and replayed it through a Warholian lens, coopting political iconography while unabashedly embracing the market. For his part, Warhol was interested in Maoist multiplicity. He had a copy of the Little Red Book and professed to admire Mao’s “simple thoughts.” 

Indeed, because Warhol could be described as the godfather of contemporary Chinese art, this seems an ideal time to reflect on his brief visit to China. I met Makos this summer in his cramped Greenwich Village apartment to ask him about the symbolic journey. The 60-year-old photographer has a scraggly, graying goatee, black square-framed glasses, a checkered shirt, a bootlace tie, and a mop of blond bed hair. He first met Warhol in 1977 when the artist bought 100 copies of his book of celebrity portraits, White Trash, and asked Makos to sign them. Explaining that he had learned from Warhol that “art is money and money is art,” Makos charged him $1 a signature, and the two became fast friends. Warhol, impressed by his level of hyperactivity, once asked him, “Can I buy your energy?”

When I visited him, Makos was sitting under a yellow and pink Mao, a gift from Warhol that has pride of place in his living room. “Of course, the Chinese always noticed him in a crowd,” Makos says of his traveling companion, “but mainly because he looked so unusual, not because he was the guy who painted those portraits of Mao.” In 1972, a decade before their journey to Beijing, Warhol had made more than 400 portraits of the Communist leader based on a ubiquitous photograph of the benevolently smiling chairman that appeared as the frontispiece of the Little Red Book. The year of Warhol’s series was also the year of Nixon’s historic visit to China and the beginning of a détente made possible by a certain sport and generally referred to as “Ping-Pong diplomacy.” Warhol’s brightly colored canvases, however ironically, reflected these political efforts to give the Chinese government a friendly face.

By 1982, Warhol had been reduced to rehashing his own greatest hits in his Retrospectives and Reversal paintings—Marilyns, soup cans, electric chairs, Maos—and to cannibalizing art history, with poppy adaptations of Botticelli, Munch, and de Chirico. A bombastic younger generation had emerged—Basquiat, Schnabel, Salle, Clemente—and, even though they referred to him deferentially as the “Pope of Pop,” their feisty neo-expressionism made his billboard aesthetic look dated and flat. Though his canvases from the early ’60s were selling at auction for more than $1 million, not a single work from his 1982 exhibition of dollar signs at Leo Castelli had found a buyer.

Warhol had been invited to Hong Kong to attend the opening of the exclusive I Club in the Bank of America Tower. The club’s owner, the wealthy collector and entrepreneur Alfred Sui, had chosen to decorate it with Pop art (Rosenquist, Lichtenstein, and Johns), and Warhol, hoping to get some commissions in Asia (“portraits to pay the rent,” as he referred to them), had loaned Sui several canvases: a recent diptych of Prince Charles and Lady Di, and pictures of Sylvester Stallone, Mick Jagger, and Judy Garland.