Marlboro

Like many Chinese avant-garde artists who began to develop their signature styles in the 1990s, Wang Guangyi's works have focused intensely on the expression of irony, criticism and derision towards Chinese tradition and the Cultural Revolution, especially in light of China's rapid pace of change since the death of Chairman Mao. For Wang, the iconography and visual strategies of Chinese propaganda have proved to be an especially productive resource for highlighting the gap between official political stances and contemporary reality. His Great Criticism series follows the rules set forth for the conventional depiction of human figures for propaganda images - that they should appear positive, strong, and heroic. But Wang displaces their conventionally didactic impact by ironically adding the names of Western brands. As with Marlboro, the fusion of these two aesthetic and ideological systems is almost disturbingly harmonious and compatible. The result is a sophisticated and furious fusion of these two antithetical systems, reflecting Wang's cynical view of the effects of history and the impact of ideological-tinged visual systems, whatever the ideology.