An
art historically important artist working in a variety of media, including
painting, sculpture and installation, Wang Guangyi is considered by critics
to be the founder of the contemporary mainland Chinese Political Pop Art
movement. This movement arose in response to the fateful Tiananmen Square
protests of 1989, also known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre.Wang
gained particular prominence in the art world in the late 1980s with a series
of paintings entitled "Great Criticism." In this series, Wang -- obviously
inspired by American Pop artist Andy Warhol -- paired ubiquitously kitschy
imagery appropriated from Chinese propaganda posters and ceramic figurines
created during China's draconian Cultural Revolution with logos of multi-national
companies engaged in the production of consumer goods. Conjoining icons
of both Communism and capitalism, two seemingly disparate political, economic
and ideological systems, Wang wryly underscores the fact that both systems
employ the same basic tactics of advertising and marketing to promote their
wares, whether they are political principles or luxury consumer products
like electronics and jewelry.In
the four individual paintings shown here as a group, Wang Guangyi continues
his critical assessment of two competing political and cultural systems,
which are currently more alike than different, as well as the impact of
creeping Western capitalist commercialism on the People's Republic of China.
In Nokia (2004) and Cartier (2004), the artist hijacks classic Cultural
Revolution woodblock imagery of smiling Red Guards jubilantly wielding the
bible of Chinese Communism, Mao Zedong's Little Red Book, under the instantly
recognizable logos of one of the world's largest cellphone purveyors and
its most famous jewelry maker.Grimly
determined Red Guards equipped with arms, shovels and Little Red Book forge
on towards ideological victory above another notoriously recognizable corporate
logo in Sony (2004), while in IBM (2004) Russian Bolshevik revolutionary
and Marxist theorist Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924), instigator of "The Red
Terror" (a campaign of mass arrests, murders and deportations targeted against
counterrevolutionaries in Russia during the Russian Civil War), exhorts
the world to embrace the tenets of Communism, IBM's logo appearing as a
caption to his historically sanitized image. Wang's repetitive use of identical
numbers as an overlay in each painting calls to mind stamped shipping codes
and assigned numbering, which in turn represent the numbing dehumanization
inherent in both Communism and capitalism.Verna
Glancy
Gallery
Director - Contemporary Chinese Fine Art
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