One Hundred Excellent Flowers

This piece is a very innovative and encouraging way to take a look at issues that have long plagued relationships between people and their leaders. This work references a speech that was given by Mao Zedong in 1957, titled “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People. Within this speech, Mao referenced letting 100 flowers bloom, a poetic phrase intended to promote and invite the citizens to vocalize their criticism on the Communist leadership at the time. Following this speech, an anti-rightist movement erupted in China wherein all of the people who were “enticed” by this poem and promise of understanding were publicly shamed or stripped of all of their assets. Meador’s approach to the topic stemmed from anger within his own life. He decided the work “One Hundred Excellent Flowers” should discuss this sense of “trickery” in a more modernized and Americanized fashion: how politics and marketing lie to the American consumer. Meador attempts to display processed snack foods in the same light that the flowers were displayed within Zedong’s speech. Meador wanted to suck the audience in and make them understand that consumerism is a temptation and a seduction that we should avoid before it is too late and we have lost ourselves and our bodies to the entities that are beginning to kill us.https://scholarship.rollins.edu/book_arts/1002/thumbnail.jp