From Eastsouthwestnorth Blog (link):
Everybody knows that 2008 Beijing is where the Olympics will be. Westerners call it the Olympic Games. There is a game in this oil painting, but it is the traditional Chinese game of mahjong.
On the top left corner of “2008-Beijing,” there is a standard head portrait of a man. He seems familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. He has Sun Yat-sen‘s beard, Chiang Kai-shek‘s bald head and Mao Zedong‘s facial features. He symbolizes the one hundred years’ of Chinese history and the sum total of the old and new democracies.
To the left of the painting, there is a innocent and focused girl who is probably celebrating because she has a good hand.
The girl in the middle with her back turned to the observer has three “east” tiles, symbolizing the unignorable reality — the emergence of China. But the girl is also trying to cheat with the tiles hidden behind her foot.
