Moodboard Maoism
by Ellena Basada
Archway Editions, 147pp, ISBN 9781648230417, $14.95
‘Whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill. Whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms.’ — Émile Littré
Written as the exhibition text for Vietnamese-American artist Diane Severin Nguyen’s film In Her Time, exhibited at the Rockbund Museum in Shanghai, Olivia Kan-Sperling’s Little Pink Book is less a companion than an accessory to the film, a kind of textual bauble that draws attention to itself rather than clarifying anything about the work it ostensibly accompanies. This disjunction can’t be accidental — Kan-Sperling refers to Little Pink Book in an afternote as a ‘perverse mistranslation’ of In Her Time, a phrase that gestures toward irreverence. And it saturates the text: ornamentation isn’t a flourish but the only mode of engagement.
~ Blushed ~ Sofa ~ Fog ~ Nothing ~ Socks ~ Chaste ~ Pink ~ What metaphysical comportment do these words, emboldened and colored rosy pink, carry across the text? Some pages feature the rose thrice, vaguely salacious in its appearance among the traditional black-and-white of printed matter. They do not make a poem, nor lyrics to a song, like ‘Peach Night Skins’, belonging to the romantically lost mind of the protagonist, Limei. Simply, this network creates an image — a moodboard — composed of snapshots from the frail, feminine, pop-world of Kan-Sperling’s imagination.
We might imagine that word ~ imagination ~ similarly highlighted, pink and aesthetic, not really a wink or nudge to the reader — for this isn’t a text of irony, necessarily, but pure artifice. This book is vaporous, clever, and compulsively readable — it’s fashionable, yet slippery. And at times, Kan-Sperling’s gestures toward the political feel questionable. What’s at stake is the tension between style and substance — the book may be cute, but its cuteness comes at the cost of historical gravity. I’m not suggesting that aesthetic detachment must yield to political earnestness, but when simulacrum stands in for examination or feeling, the valorisation of emptiness over content in contemporary art and writing begins to feel dumbly chilling.
This chill unfolds in Little Pink Book’s treatment of Limei. The book follows the virginal barista as she is scouted by a handsome, dangerous older fellow who ultimately takes advantage of her, then gaslights her about his intentions. The book and its characters slip into the familiar narrative trope of the ‘Golden Heart’, as coined by filmmaker Lars von Trier to describe his trilogy of endlessly caring, doomed female protagonists based on Mary Magdalene, rendered in ‘banal and sentimental’ storytelling. Kan-Sperling’s own subversive spin is her engagement with so-called ‘Oriental identity’, incorporating her own shame at writing from her ‘Chinese side’, while remaining firmly within the realm of aesthetic play.
In one biting scene, Kan-Sperling writes: ‘Limei’s heart was big, but her bed was small. Above it was a wonderful fresco of ripped images bleeding down the walls and almost onto the pillow. There was the cute face of Faye Wong and the cloudy face of Maggie Cheung, the blonde face of Natassja Kinski. . . Clearly, this girl, although not a cripple, was creative and complicated.’ Rather than offering psychological depth, the scene assembles Limei from fragments of feminine star power. Aspiration, emotion, and debility collapse into a kind of stylized inference — suggestive, but ultimately illegible. It’s a telling mise-en-scène: identity in Little Pink Book is merely a collage, one with an affective charge that veils a deeper cynicism.
By contrast, Nguyen’s In Her Time takes up the ethics of representation with oblique seriousness. The film takes up a young actress named Iris as she prepares to reenact the 1937 Massacre of Nanjing in Hengdian World Studios, the world’s largest historical film set. If Kan-Sperling’s text touches historical trauma at a slant, with self-aware frivolity, Nguyen’s film confronts it with weighty kitsch, layering rehearsal, repetition, and a deft precision of images, to make visible the existential toll on a girl tasked with staging atrocity.
Engaging with trauma doesn’t have to be sincere, cringe, or sentimental — the register Little Pink Book seems terribly aware of avoiding — but Kan-Sperling offers no real attempt to grapple with film’s political or aesthetic stakes, to take part in its references and implications. Instead, it floats at a hesitant remove, sticking its fingers in the wound of revolution only long enough to extract a glistening pink.
Reading the description of Little Pink Book — ‘somewhere between polaroid and porn popup; proverb, pop lyric, and propaganda’ — one can’t help but get caught up in the alliterative propulsion of the ‘p’, which, in this succession, seems to subsume the rest of the vowels and consonants into a generalised ‘aw’ sound. The result might be a repetitive ‘pop’. But what is ‘pop’? Kan-Sperling has made it clear that her intellectual and artistic purview is ‘pop culture’ — her previous publication Island Time (2022) is a literary fan-fiction of pop-literature. (Yes, so many dashes in these descriptions, and you might locate Kan-Sperling’s work there: in the juncture of the real, neither fan nor fiction, pop or literature. . .)
In her n+1 essay ‘Toward Pop Literature’, Kan-Sperling references the Chinese concept of shanzhai — knock-off culture — as a mode of generative mistranslation. ‘It is understood that an artwork is enriched by the allusions, inversions, and contextual revisions made possible by its reinterpretation of style and subject matter,’ she writes, echoing Byung-Chul Han’s account of shanzhai as a tradition in which copies are fluid reinterpretations, equivalent to the original, part of an evolving text.
Little Pink Book makes this ethos explicit in its afternote, citing Chinese literati painting as a precedent for creative misreading. Yet, even as it borrows this language, the book sidesteps the historical and political conditions that give shanzhai its urgency. What in Han’s framing is a challenge to originality becomes in Kan-Sperling’s hands a kind of artistic license, a permission slip for play. In doing so, Little Pink Book does not remake anything so much as it restyles cultural memory into an Oriental vibe untethered from place, language, or political consequence.
This sense of detachment becomes most striking when contrasted with In Her Time, which navigates similar terrain of simulation but does so with a deeper ethical commitment. Shot in and around a sprawling replica of imperial China built for mass media spectacle, Nguyen’s film stages this memory differently: as a recursive, disorienting narrative in which Iris rehearses her role in a reproduction of the Nanjing Massacre. The violence remains offscreen, abstracted, but the labor of preparing to reenact it is foregrounded: learning lines, repeating gestures, familiarising herself with gore — breaking down and building up affect.
In the hollowed-out simulacrum of Hengdian World Studios, Nguyen stages exhaustion, different from emptiness: the affective toll of living within layers of historical representation. Here, performance becomes a way to access what cannot be fully represented from history, insisting that even the most artificial stage bears the weight of the real. Nguyen isn’t rejecting hyperreality so much as using it to reveal the emotional traces flung forward from the past.
Accessorizing In Her Time, which confronts the entanglement of artifice and history directly, Little Pink Book glosses the surface, fetishising this simulation further, which in Kan-Sperling’s mode, becomes not confrontation but displacement, citation in place of critique.
Little Pink Book takes its name, knowingly and provocatively, from Little Red Book, Mao Zedong’s pocket-sized volume of quotations that circulated during the Cultural Revolution, both an ideological scripture and mass-produced object. Designed for portability, memorisation, and mass alignment, the Red Book was a vehicle for revolutionary interiority and exterior performance. Kan-Sperling’s version is a boutique inversion — revolutionary red diluted into consumerist pink, earnest recitation swapped for style.
In ‘Toward Pop Literature’, Kan-Sperling stakes a claim for writing that is slick, scummy, fast, thin, proudly allergic to traditional notions of depth or form. Pop, in this formulation, is both a genre and sensibility: gleefully minor, impure, and styled after the disposable. Little Pink Book seems to take up this charge literally, offering a simulated scripture for mood calibration and nostalgia.
Mao’s book sought to obliterate the ‘Four Olds’ (old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits) in the name of ideological transformation. It was a manual for rupture. Little Pink Book, by contrast, offers similar signs, although there is no program or theory, only a grand gesture towards historical meaning. I can’t help but notice the way her awkwardly juvenile style mimics the pragmatic futurism of the Cultural Revolution’s campaign: ‘lively study, lively application’,; The Great Leap Forward. Comparably, the flatly jubilant (a contradiction, I know) slogan of Limei’s café states: ‘Can You Put A Surprise On That.’
Spun and re-contextualised in an essentially meaningless setting, Kan-Sperling’s use of Maoist tone isn’t an undoing, or a rewriting, but a kind of residue. Historical violence is combined with femininity in affective leftovers, offering latté-art feeling (I might evoke Nguyen’s foundational image that also appears on the cover of the book: iridescent, magenta bubbles hovering over the barrel of a gun) in place of structure or soul. In this way, it aligns less with the ecstatic contradiction of real pop culture, where pleasure and suffering are always at stake, and more with Baudrillard’s hyperreality, a world where signs, zombified, immortal, and parasitic, come to replace all we hold near and dear.
With this context in mind, one could claim that pop is an aesthetic of geopolitical inheritance. As a postcolonial formation, pan-Asian identity has long been mediated by pop culture’s surfaces: K-pop, J-dramas, Taiwanese New Cinema, Studio Ghibli, even Maoist kitsch. It attempts, like the Cultural Revolution’s call to erase the ‘Four Olds’, to invent something new by way of the simulacrum: a modern identity unburdened by history that is both sleek and exportable. The logic of pan-Asianness — as it appears in both In Her Time and Little Pink Book — is inseparable from pop’s logic: fragmentary, synthetic, hybridised, and eternally reproducible.
In Little Pink Book, pan-Asian identity falters as style; anything that could be called ‘solidarity’ or cultural specificity are flattened into floating signifiers rendered in blush and ambient Mandarin. The text’s translation into Chinese — despite Kan-Sperling’s lack of fluency — further dramatises this drift: a kind of global Asian gesture that is less about language than about vibe.
This makes the title even more fraught, especially placed against the real-world ‘Little Pink’ movement: a loosely organised group of digital-era Chinese nationalists known for their fervent online defence of the Chinese state. The emergence of Little Pink reflects a crisis of belief among China’s digital youth — disillusioned with 1990s-era universalism, disaffected by globalisation’s false promises, and increasingly attracted to statist Marxism as a counter to domestic inequality.
There is a longing here: for recognition, for power, for a new ideological clarity after the failed utopias of liberal modernity. Yet, in Little Pink Book, this tense emotional and political terrain is washed out into a palette of suggestion. What was once a response to failed futures becomes a brand of melancholic girlhood: soft, sad, vaguely ironic — and maybe, artistically, that’s rather compelling. But the way Kan-Sperling’s text unwittingly mimics the gestures of the Cultural Revolution, wiping out historical complexity in the name of newness, without the conviction, terror, or hope that made those gestures transformative, feels a bit frightening.
In Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard distinguishes between two forms of nihilism: one political, violent, and metaphysical (terrorism); the other aesthetic, self-referential, and immaterial (dandyism). Little Pink Book belongs squarely in the latter category. Dandyism, in Baudrillard’s terms, empties reality of meaning by transforming life (and here, literature, art, &c.) into a performance of signs. It is a refusal to participate in ‘serious’ reality, choosing instead to circulate through style. Nguyen’s film stylises the seriousness of history in a way that feels interesting and unique; Kan-Sperling’s text hangs over it completely.
In this way, Little Pink Book doesn’t just perform dandyism; it participates in what Fredric Jameson famously called pastiche: a ‘blank parody’ that imitates style without satirical intent or critical edge. If parody presupposes a real — something authentic to distort or comment on — pastiche emerges in the void left by the collapse of that real. It is imitation without content, ‘speech in a dead language’.
Little Pink Book, then, is not only fake, but a meditation on fakeness — a forgery of the real, and a version of reality so processed and aestheticised that the question of truth no longer applies. And yes, this version of reality has become our real: Instagram filters, iPhone screens, Zoom calls, Labubus. . . It all exists in the realm Baudrillard calls the simulacrum: where signs refer only to other signs, and the real becomes a mirage chased through layers of style.
There’s something inarguably stylish, even seductive, about the book’s softening of this world, an embodiment of Kan-Sperling’s own elusive navigation of meaning, identity, and artmaking. Still, Little Pink Book — this pink hologram of itself — flaunts its emptiness in a way that borders on charlatanism. Why do we need more art that knows it’s fake and revels in that knowledge? What once may have passed for subversion now feels indistinguishable from passive participation in the very conditions it mimics. Little Pink Book risks becoming yet another cultural artifact that gestures toward critique while luxuriating in detachment, participating in a broader aesthetic mode that evades the labor of clarity, coherence, or care.
Baudrillard’s dandy might have once shimmered against the grain of seriousness, but today, in an era defined by billionaire technocrats, genocide, and a radical defunding of the arts, disaffection no longer disturbs, it ~ dissolves ~. Aesthetic nihilism, as a mode, has become flashy, and not much more than boring.
It’s clear that Kan-Sperling’s progenitors are artists of detachment. For both Tao Lin and Tan Lin, who appear as blurbers on the back of Little Pink Book, disaffection is a deliberate boundary: Tao Lin’s autofiction flattens affect into a kind of personal mythos, while Tan Lin’s conceptual writing revels in aesthetic surfaces and internet ephemera. Their works, as their blurbs suggest, are unconcerned with political charge. Tan Lin celebrates Kan-Sperling’s ‘hologram light show’ and Tao Lin praises her ‘wink and a smile’. Detached, for them, is the point.
But Little Pink Book is not a blog post or a social media collage. It’s a text commissioned to accompany Diane Severin Nguyen’s In Her Time, a film about the Nanjing Massacre, and it frames itself within one of the 20th century’s most iconic political objects: Mao’s Little Red Book. This move demands a different kind of reckoning. Should Kan-Sperling ever decide to confront the weight of her own materials, she could write something far more provocative.