Mao Trump

2016-2018

Mao Trump fuses Mao Zedong and Donald Trump into a composite portrait examining the transformation of political authority into spectacle. Conceived in 2015 and first exhibited at the LA Art Show in January 2016, the series extends Knowledge Bennett’s investigation of Andy Warhol’s visual language.

Working in acrylic and silkscreen on canvas, Bennett returns to Warhol’s Mao to consider how charisma, branding, repetition, and visual saturation shape public belief. The composite brings distinct political histories into confrontation without treating their systems or consequences as identical.

The image’s circulation through international media became part of the condition it examines. Mao Trump asks how political identity is constructed, consumed, and contested when personality becomes an instrument of public power.