Mao 99 by Andy Warhol presents Mao Zedong in sharp, high-contrast color that immediately disrupts the solemn authority of official portraiture. In this artwork, Warhol renders Mao’s face in deep navy blue, and sets it against a cool aqua ground that flattens depth and heightens graphic impact. Bright green lips cut across the composition, unnatural and electric. Red accents along the collar and facial edges sharpen the silhouette. The image feels both monumental and theatrical, its exaggerated palette transforming a state image into something closer to spectacle.
Mao 99 in The Mao Series
Mao 99 is one of the prints that Andy Warhol included in his Mao portfolio from 1972. Mao 99, sometimes called the “blue Mao,” and the nine other silkscreen prints in the series mark the culmination of Warhol’s interest in Chinese culture, specifically Maoism. The works stage a confrontation between two opposing political ideologies. Yet a clear synthesis emerges through repetition. Repetition functions as the most immediate tool for capturing mass attention, and both Maoist propaganda and Warhol’s silkscreen method rely on it.
Propaganda, Repetition, and Controversy
With this series, Warhol transgressed the strict and sacred conventions surrounding depictions of Mao Zedong. In Communist China, official portrayals of the Chairman were expected to remain serious, idealized, and restrained in color. By contrast, the Mao portfolio transformed Mao into a Pop Art icon. Warhol drew from the familiar portrait on the cover of the Little Red Book, an image already saturated with symbolic authority and therefore primed for artistic manipulation. This choice later proved controversial. In 2013, eight Mao prints were removed from a major Warhol retrospective after it arrived in China. Officials feared the color treatments might be read as cosmetic or irreverent.
Politics and Power in Warhol’s Work
The Mao portfolio reveals the political dimension of Warhol’s practice, even as he maintained an outwardly neutral stance toward politics. His interest lay less in ideology than in power, visibility, and fame. This fascination surfaces elsewhere in portfolios such as Reigning Queens, Lenin, and Alexander the Great. By treating Mao as he would a movie star, Warhol suggested that political authority and celebrity operate through similar mechanisms of image and repetition. The timing was relevant. In 1972, just before the portfolio’s release, Richard Nixon visited China, placing Mao and Chinese power at the center of American media attention.
Mao 99 in Warhol’s Larger Body of Work
Not even Warhol could rival the sheer volume of Maoist imagery produced by the People’s Republic of China. Yet he did not need to. Instead, he reframed that imagery, returning it to the public as a visual provocation. The contrast of navy blue, bright green, and aqua in Mao 99 creates a composition that feels both celebratory and unsettling. The fantasy of green lips renders Mao unreal, almost cinematic, an image that feels impossible yet familiar. In 1982, Warhol stood before the monumental Mao portrait at Tiananmen Square, near the entrance to the Forbidden City. By then, the transformation was complete. Mao had become not only a political figure, but an image—one perfectly suited to Warhol’s most ambitious and politically charged portfolio.
Photo Credit: Andy Warhol in front of Tiananmen Square, Beijing, 1982. Image © Christopher Makos, 1982
