Daily Epic, Scissors and Still Life

After 1993, Mao turned his attention to elements of everyday objects. When Political Pop and Cynical Realism popular at the time, Daily Epic series was a response to the commercialisation of those movements. The series can be Mao's desire to find beauty and spiritual refinement in his own world. In Daily Epic: Scissors and Still Life (Lot 576), his current use of highly metaphorical imagery, liberating them from their traditional purpose and allowing them to become a symbol within the realm of the painting. Being in a dramatic settings, or in abstracted, contrasting background makes the objects interchangeable. The literal significance of the objects is purposefully eliminated in favor of the overall feeling that the artist seeks to convey. By choosing objects that has a clearly defined image and universal validity, complex ideas and ambiguous feelings can be generated when this object is placed in an unusual context - even to a level of religious significance: Just as religious icons attain potency from our concentration on their forms, but are worshipped beyond their material functions, the ordinary household scossors become, in the art of Mao, a symbol of iconic transcendence that goes far beyond their habitual function.
By trying with different forms and shapes he finds the image of scissors most alluring. They are embodied simply as forms. "Scissors" cut the historical context of power in "parent", revealing a helpless condition in the society. An important aspect of Mao's work is finding the balance between turbulent emotion, evoked by elemental nature, loneliness, superstition and religion on one hand, and orderly rationality, resembled by ordinary objects on the other hand. The trajectory of Daily Epic series mark the philosophical and artistic development of Mao. His art have assimilated absolute cultural significante and become an alliteration for the existential and sociological circumstances of his era.