Ruff's Tableaux chinois arose from his long-standing interest in the genre of propaganda photography, which is inherently in conflict with the medium’s mimetic capability as it presents an ideologically inflected version of reality. The artist previously explored the chasm between representation and reality in series such as Zeitungsfotos (Newspaper Photographs) (1990–1991) and Plakate (Posters) (1996–1999). However, here he widens his scope to simultaneously encompass the analog and the digital, as well as the cultural and the political. In these works, Ruff takes images of Mao Zedong scanned from La Chine magazine—the French iteration of a periodical that the Chinese Communist Party produced specifically for Europe from the late 1950s through the 1970s—and manipulates them to create images with both the halftone of the “analog” offset printing and the “digital” structure of the pixel image. As Susanne Holschbach observes, “Ruff has visually merged the technological process of preparing photographs for their mass distribution from the two photographic eras on one pictorial plane.”1
1 Susanne Holschbach, “Flâneur, Researcher, Image Producer: Thomas Ruff and the Photographic Archive,” in Thomas Ruff, ed. Susanne Gaensheimer and Falk Wolf (Düsseldorf: Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, 2020), p. 43.
