Andy Warhol in China. Lunch at The Great Wall; an afternoon of sight-seeing in the capital; a dinner engagement at a Peking Duck restaurant; only a tentative entry to 'meet with Chinese artists' suggests that this visitor's itinerary was any different from your average Beijing sightseer.
Yet this tour plan, on show in Shanghai at the moment, alongside photographs from the trip, documents Andy Warhol first and only trip to mainland China in November 1982, with his friend the photographer Christopher Makos. Warhol's 1982 itinerary Their four-day break was arranged, as an extension to a Hong Kong visit, where Warhol and Makos had gone to open a nightclub. The Industrialist Alfred Siu and the current director of LA's MOCA Jeffrey Deitch – then an art adviser at Citibank – had arranged for the pair to come to HK, and offered them a trip to the Chinese capital as a kind of thank-you. Indeed, Warhol had been ruminating on The Middle Kingdom for sometime. The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The warhol: