Madame Mao’s Dowry opened in Shanghai in 2001 with an idea: to explore the design of the Mao Period (1949–1976) and its relationship to contemporary Chinese design.

 

We brought together authentic posters, artwork, photographs and everyday objects from the period, displaying them alongside carefully chosen pieces of antique provincial furniture. The aim was to create a setting in which the visual culture of modern China could be appreciated on its own terms, while offering a glimpse of the design culture emerging around us.

 

We then began inviting artists and designers living and working in Shanghai to exhibit and sell their work in this context. What started as a design store became a meeting place for different ideas, influences and approaches to making things.

 

A name with a story

 

We chose the name Madame Mao’s Dowry to reflect our connection with modern China and our fascination with the beauty of ordinary things.

 

Mao is a common Chinese surname, but also the name of the most famous figure in China’s modern history. The infamous Jiang Qing, Mao’s last wife, became a powerful figure in revolutionary culture. Before her was He Zizhen, a revolutionary who accompanied Mao on the Long March, enduring serious wounds and the extraordinary hardships of life in wartime. Earlier still was Yang Kaihui, Mao’s second wife, an early Communist revolutionary who was executed in Changsha in 1930 after refusing to renounce her political commitment.

 

A dowry, meanwhile, is a collection of things assembled for a daughter as she begins a new home. Each item is chosen for its usefulness, its beauty or its place in everyday life.

 

We brought these three words together deliberately. They create a certain tension between politics and domesticity, history and the everyday, the grand and the ordinary. We liked the fact that the name might prompt a question, provoke a reaction or simply make someone smile. We wanted it to invite different interpretations, rather than prescribe a single meaning.

 

Then and now

 

Our work has always brought together three strands: a substantial collection of original Chinese propaganda posters and news photographs; objects and designs created under our own label; and a changing selection of work by contemporary designers.

 

Through these, we explore the significance of the Mao Period in the visual culture of China today. The connections are rarely straightforward. Design does not develop in a neat, linear progression, and neither the work we present nor the people who create it fit comfortably into a single category. Our designers have different backgrounds, nationalities and ways of working, and it is precisely this diversity that makes the conversation interesting.

 

Over the years, we have also developed our own projects to connect China’s history with contemporary creativity. Many have focused on propaganda art as a form of visual culture, encouraging people to look beyond its political messages and consider its graphics, imagery and design. Others have followed our curiosity in different directions — because we have never been very good at staying in one box.

 

Madame Mao’s Dowry has always been about looking again: at familiar objects, overlooked histories and the unexpected connections between past and present.

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