Born: Changde, Hunan province, 1977. Lives and works in Beijing.

“I don’t really care about politics,” He Jie says, “nor do I care much about the role politics plays in art—I believe real art cannot be the instrument of politics.” But He Jie does care about, and comment on, the way politics instrumentalises people. The setting of his huge triptych I Have a Dream that I Will Stand on Tiananmen and Shoot the Oriental Arrow (2007) is identical to that of Dong Xiwen’s iconic Founding Ceremony (1953), which memorialised Mao Zedong’s proclamation of the People’s Republic of China. That older painting was reworked several times to erase officials who fell from Party favour. He Jie’s monochrome version erases everyone from Dong Xiwen’s scene and replaces the apparatchiks with a single Mongolian archer in Red Army uniform, his arrow aimed at the spot where Mao’s head used to be. This figure—headless and pierced by arrows—is for the artist “a symbol of the future trajectory of the revolution”. He Jie has an abiding interest in such symbols. His I Floated Down the Magnificent Zhongshan Square (2005) shows a young man asleep at the foot of a statue of Mao and a group of followers. It is based on a real statue which—like the Tiananmen balcony in Dong Xiwen’s picture—struck He Jie as “a kind of stage prop, gesturing towards a beautiful future”.