To Mao or [not] to marry

This installation in the window of Lane Crawford's 'home and lifestyle store' of colourful Mao cherubs hovering above a rather grim-looking couple is by Beijing artist Qu Guangci.
These Maos may well ponder their presence in a shop that was started by two Scotsmen, Thomas Ash Lane and Ninian Crawford, in a bamboo structure on the Hong Kong waterfront in 1850. This leading specialty store promises the best of everything from around the world. The weightlessness of the suspended angels is echoed in an earlier series of birdman works by Guangci that was influenced by Italo Calvino's story The baron in the trees and the paintings of Bada Shanren (1624-1705).

Guangci is attracted to Calvino's sense of fantasy, aesthetic freedom and flexibility but in particular his use of 'lightness':    
I always endeavor to lessen the sense of heaviness: the heaviness of human beings, the heaviness of heavenly bodies, and the heaviness of cities.

The light, pop-like irreverence of the Mao cherubs belie the heaviness of the Cultural Revolution from which these figures stem. The heaviness of cities and human beings was reported in the South China Post of 19 May 2011:

A 22-year-old woman in a wedding is grabbed and hauled to safety by a community officer after she jumped from a window in a seven-storey residential building in Changchung, Jilin province. According to reports, the dramatic rescue took place after the woman's boyfriend of four years jilted her as they were making plans to get married. The woman did not suffer any injuries in the incident.

This suspended angel did not have a moment of lightness of being in the city.

http://www.artzinechina.com/display.php?a=834 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IwBULAQa3k
http://www.artzinechina.com/display_vol_aid375_en.html