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Lot Essay
Wang Guangyi is one of the leading protagonists of China's contemporary avant-garde art movement. This movement first emerged in China in the mid-1980s when artists first began to encounter Western thought and art practice on a new scale, and anticipated playing a central role in the creation of a new, post-socialist modern Chinese culture. Wang Guangyi in particular was active during this period as a theorist, critic and supporter of experimentation in the arts.
Into the 1990s, irony and cynicism became necessary strategies of expression in the increasingly urbanized and consumerist Chinese social environment. Like many of his contemporaries, Wang began to take a closer look at the impact of the Communist visual culture that he grew up with, appropriating its compositional and figurative strategies in order the highlight the rapid changes gripping contemporary society. As with the propaganda images from which he quotes, his figures are positive, strong, and heroic. But in his Great Criticism works, instead of being coupled with inspirational calls to action, they are paired with international consumer brand names. Each canvas features two repeating numbers, a reminder to audiences of the stringent limitations on the public decimation of knowledge and images under communism, referencing the two licenses required to publish (one to produce, and one for distribution).
As with this fine example from the series, the fusion of these two aesthetic and ideological systems is surprisingly visually compatible. Typical of the "grey humor" of Political Pop artists, Wang's fusion of these two supposedly antithetical systems displays ambivalence towards any extreme ideological position whatever it may be.
Into the 1990s, irony and cynicism became necessary strategies of expression in the increasingly urbanized and consumerist Chinese social environment. Like many of his contemporaries, Wang began to take a closer look at the impact of the Communist visual culture that he grew up with, appropriating its compositional and figurative strategies in order the highlight the rapid changes gripping contemporary society. As with the propaganda images from which he quotes, his figures are positive, strong, and heroic. But in his Great Criticism works, instead of being coupled with inspirational calls to action, they are paired with international consumer brand names. Each canvas features two repeating numbers, a reminder to audiences of the stringent limitations on the public decimation of knowledge and images under communism, referencing the two licenses required to publish (one to produce, and one for distribution).
As with this fine example from the series, the fusion of these two aesthetic and ideological systems is surprisingly visually compatible. Typical of the "grey humor" of Political Pop artists, Wang's fusion of these two supposedly antithetical systems displays ambivalence towards any extreme ideological position whatever it may be.