Between 1989 and 1992 most modern artists were depressed, anxious, and confused. Some critics and artists went abroad to Europe or the United States to seek new possibilities at this time, and they were the envy of most artists and critics.[1] In October 1989, Zhang Xiaogang discussed in a letter to Yang Qian in the United States the works he completed during the holidays in Kunming, and in the letter he reveals his heightened anxiety about reality: the floods in Sichuan, the heat wave in Chongqing, the earthquake in Aba, the food shortage, the rise in train fares, the sharing out of public debt, the pollution in Huangjueping, the schoolchildren dying because of pollution, and so on.
He told Yang: the school come away young teachers are talking about leaving the school subject, but very conflicted on the inside: “If I stay here, life is already very hard, so I should go abroad. We are becoming increasingly aware of the fate and status of Chinese artists”. [2] Although Yang Qian in his reply tried to persuade Zhang that it was best to go abroad because in his view the situation in China was terrible, [3] but ultimately he did not convince Zhang to go to the United States. In December, in a letter to Mao Xuhui, Zhang wrote:
A Chinese artist can only be successful abroad, if he is inseparable from the background with China’s current reality. Of course, in the special context of today, there are people who eat buns soaked in human blood. Such a person wears a Zhongshan suit and swaggers about in the presence of foreigners, declaring himself to be a ‘dissident’.
I received a letter from Yang who advised me to go abroad, and I’m now going to write and tell him what I really think about the idea. I think this is just not the time to flee. I don’t want to join Asia’s “Gypsy army”. If I leave China, there will be no “art” to speak of; as long as I can paint what I want to paint, I will still stay here. …… [4]
In any case at this time going abroad was an elusive thing for most people, and coping with life on a daily basis was difficult enough. This reality made people look at their daily lives, rather than consult books by Nietzsche and Sartre. Their ideals were clipped by their post-1989 state of shock.
In January 1990, the Tàpies exhibition was staged in Beijing and Tàpies’ technique of using different materials on canvas inspired a small group of young Chinese artists who wish to continue to wrestle with the grand soul and inner tragedy to enhance texture in their work. However, this art still weighed people down and the pressure it expressed was unbearable. As a result, a group of young art teachers from Beijing’s Central Academy of Arts, influenced by the historical environment in which the people of Beijing found themselves, began to paint works on lighter themes drawn from daily life. In 1991, exhibitions were staged in Beijing of oil paintings by Liu Xiaodong (May), works by Xu Bing (May), paintings by female painters (May), oil paintings by Yu Hong, New Generation Art (July), paintings by Zhao Bandi and Li Tianyuan (September), and paintings by Shen Ling (September). These exhibitions demonstrated the artists’ temperament and style, but they all had one common feature: themes of daily life and “proximity” (jinjuli), to use Yin Jinan’s term. Among them, the New Generation Art Exhibition represented a symbolic generalization of such phenomena; many artists who took part in the exhibition indeed belonged to the New Generation, and they expressed a psychological abandonment of questions of essentialism.
In the same way as the modernist artists of the 1980s sought inspiration in European Impressionism, Fauvism, Expressionism and Surrealism, the Beijing artists of this period were responding correspondingly tohyper-realism (Wei Rong) and Lucien Freud (Liu Xiaodong). Although Liu Xiaodong said later that his art was far removed from that of Lucien Freud, he retained a memory of that artist’s work. In the same way the Southwestern artists such as Mao Xuhui were fond of the art of Edvard Munch. From the early 1980s onwards, young Chinese artists saw many Western art exhibitions and albums of Western art also constantly increased in number over time, which meant that their understanding of Western art was more integrated and no longer simplistic and random; they were always able to find something of the inner selves in Western art, they were fond of positioning themselves within languages related to reality, and could naturally convert these to their own styles of artistic expression.
The term “New Generation” was, of course, the title of the exhibition, but the term also summed up the changes in the period from 1989 to 1992: the shift from the modernism of the 1980s and distancing themselves from the moods of modernism. For example, works by leading artists in Beijing in the 1980s such as Chen Wenji, Ma Lu, Cao Li and Su Xinping left people tired, and the “art institute high school generation” of Yu Hong and Wang Hao abandoned their heaviness and complexity. No one understood for sure why Wang Hao used photographic language to depict Beijing street scenes, nor did anyone understand the poses and gestures in Yu Hong’s paintings of young women, but in these artists’ works one could not detect suppressed desires, passionate anger, or idealistic yearning.
Could this be because these artists had discarded the heaviness of modernism and because they did not have the understand and feeling of reality common to artists born in the 1950s that these artists were able to break out, or were they motivated by some other concept? The explanation for this phenomenon is multifaceted. In July 1991 the Museum of Chinese History staged the “New Generation Art Exhibition”; artists included Wang Hao, Wang Huaxiang, Wang Yuping, Wang Youshen, Wang Hu, Liu Qinghe, Zhou Jirong, Wang Jinsong, Song Yonghong, Zhu Jia, Pang Lei, Yu Hong, Wei Rong, Shen Ling, Chen Shuxia, and Zhan Wang. Because of the affiliation of the sponsors, Wang Youshen, an artist working for Beijing Youth Daily, became one of the de facto curators. Other curators were Zhou Yan, Fan Di’an, Kong Chang’an, and Yin Jinan. The exhibition committee explained: “The exhibition is a concentrated reflection of important aspects of the present history of art, and this may be one of the most important art exhibitions in recent years, because it brings together the mentality of the times”. However, in theory, summing up the “New Generation” was problematic; the artists did not issue their own declaration and the artists themselves said that their goal was to paint “authentic” pictures. No one understood what authentic paintings were. This provided a target for critics, who said that the “New Generation” of painters had abandoned the purpose and criticality of art and were simply a variation of the academic style, although Yi Ying, a fine arts teacher from the Central Academy of Fine Arts defended the “neo-academic” style. [5] There were also critics who said that the “New Generation” was a softer generation who had retreated in the face of political trends, distancing themselves from conflicts and problems.
The critic Yin Jinan who withdrew from working on the exhibition in midstream had this to say:
At present, among the few theoretical attempts to provide an explanation, there are ambiguous or unique explanations. Some have described the central idea of the New Generation or the “proximity” artists as “ridicule and self-mockery”, and they have also been described as having a “punkish attitude” (popi yishi). Basically, the above interpretations provide the concepts of the New Generation or the “proximity” artists with a psychological position….
The New Generation and the “proximity” artists were simply a new beginning, as were the 1990s. The New Generation artists tried to combine a formulaic or stylized art language with their immersion in what they felt to be proximity to real life at the outset of their art practice. Some of their works already commented on culture. The significance of the New Generation and the “proximity” artists, like all theory, had to stand the dispassionate test of history. [6]
Critics used a number of concepts and terms to summarize the art phenomenon of the early 1990s: Lü Peng wrote that “due to their background knowledge, they had no burden of history or sentimental memories”; the New Generation artists had no interest in the “humanity”, “ultimate goals”, “the grand soul” and “salvation” that concerned artists in the 1980s. Lü Peng describes the features of those changes:
Concepts and mental states had changed in the face of reality, shifting from mankind to the individual, from metaphysical paradise to daily life, from the abstract to the concrete, from enthusiasm to cold detachment, from concern with saving mankind to floating freely, from analytical reason to reflective perception, from indirect imagination to direct expression, from risk taking to placid quietude, from poetry to prose, from collectivism to individualism, from the center to the periphery, from anxiety to indifference, from serious to flip, from responsibility to rejection, from remote to “close-up”. It was because of such changes the realist works of the artists of the New Generation were so distinctly different from the “classical style” paintings of the time or the realist Scar paintings of a decade earlier. [7]
Political pressure and educational experience allowed artists almost instinctively to change direction. The phenomenon of the New Generation showed that, at the same time as they sought advantages and avoided disadvantages and retained their tastes and interests, they avoided social conflict and anything that caused psychological harm. This allowed younger artists to steer of the path of criticality of the previous generation. They preferred to acknowledge their own feelings and regarded the artistic purpose of their own style of painting. Their purpose could not be compared in the slightest to the critique and cultural values of earlier activists. The history of art seems to demonstrate that, like the differences that set those artists who took part in the first and second world wars apart from those who avoided war, those artists who regarded art as a political weapon and a tool were also great artists; in the history of 20th-century Chinese art, there is no shortage of such artist.
Psychologically different from the “New Generation” in their use of true nature and reality as artistic themes were those artists that the critic Li Xianting described as “Cynical Realists”. The main artists exemplifying this trend were Fang Lijun and Liu Wei, and then Yue Minjun in the mid-1990s. In temperament, critics and art historians also included other artists from various cities among the group deemed to not have the earlier seriousness of purpose nor a sense of social or political resistance: Zeng Fanzhi (Beijing), Wang Jinsong (Beijing), Song Yonghong (Beijing), Deng Jianjin (Guangzhou), Zeng Hao (Guangzhou), Zhong Biao (Chongqing), Xin Haizhou (Chongqing), the brothers Guo Wei and Guo Jin (Chengdu and Chongqing), and Shen Xiaotong (Chengdu). Fang Lijun described how he denied all values or would, at least, not affirm any particular set of values. This attitude was very similar to that of characters in Wang Shuo’s novels, who were mocking, not serious, without values, and also avoided conflict whenever possible.
In April 1992, in a museum in a converted temple on the outskirts of Beijing, Liu Wei and Fang Lijun held an exhibition of oil paintings. In the introduction of the small catalog, Li Xianting wrote:
I call the neo-realist trend that appeared in 1988-1989 was mainly focused in Beijing “Cynical Realism” (wanshi xianshizhuyi). The Chinese term “wanshi” is almost synonymous with the English word “cynical”, but it lacks the taunting cold ridicule of the English term’s cool detachment from reality and life. However, Cynical Realism represented a new cultural tendency in the modernist ideological trend of the 1980s. The 1989 China/Avant-Garde: China Modern Art Exhibition marked the end of a phase of China’s new wave art of the 1980s, and at the same time it represented a heavy blow to the idealistic attempt to introduce Western modern culture to rescue and reconstruct China’s new culture. Cynical Realism was the inevitable spiritual product in the face of a shattered psychological state. [8]
Cynical Realism are was regarded by some critics as philistinism in its rejection of the critical stance of the 1980s but, in analyzing the phenomenon, Li Xianting regarded it as a special form of resistance. He saw the “sense of ennui” expressed by these artists in the following way:
Their sense of ennui led them to abandon earlier art’s idealism and heroics and the Promethean heights from which the previous two generations of artists viewed man, and to switch to a mundane view of their position in reality. Their ennui spelled pointlessness and their pointlessness meant that they did not have to show respect, and so their ennui also prompted them to laugh at themselves, and to be irreverent, cynical, and indifferent in attitude when describing themselves and the familiar, boring, incidental and absurd lives that surrounded them, which shaped the artistic style of their hooligan (popi) humor. [9]
The values of Cynical Realism were ambiguous, but its attitude was far removed from the obligatory official political position. In language, Cynical Realism retained images, but the artist could consciously debase these images, and make full use of modified designs and ready-made images to create his own stable images. In the work of these artists, one could sense aspects of the Chinese temperament: self-deprecation (and self-abasement), exaggeration, a lack of realism, opportunism, refusal to adopt a position, smugness, and helplessness. Fang Lijun included schematic images of his friends and himself in his works, Liu Wei relied on photographs of his parents, and Yue Minjun included designs based on his own grinning face; such paintings were completely different from the visually imitative objects and the thinking in the paintings of the “New Generation” artists.
At about the same time, pop art related to society, politics, and history emerged. Initially, the Wuhan artists regarded the emergence of commercial society as providing the raison d’être for their pop art. The tight controls exerted by politics and ideology had quickly driven people into business, and during this period, a large number of publications appeared discussing the phenomenon; many people in Party and government organs, state enterprises and institutions made the strategic decision to leave their jobs and take up work in a commercial company or set up their own business. In a book on current affairs published in 1992 titled China’s Big Bang Theory (People's China Publishing House) a number of slogans appeared on the title page: “the sleeping lion of the Orient is woken up by money”; “the political challenge of stocks and shares”; “the market controls China”; and “law and the economy advance together”.
Another work of reportage and research titled Chinese Intellectual Upheaval had the subtitle: “Chinese Intellectuals Cast Anchor in the Stormy Sea of Business”. According to the logic of traditional Chinese thinking, businessmen are lower-level people in society, because of their alleged venality, lack of education, and retrograde thought. Yet this book revealed how during this period a large number of famous intellectuals in China had gone into business and a section of the book discussing the phenomenon was titled: “Elegy for China’s Contemporary Literati: The Choice Mammon or the Muses”.
In spring 1992 advertisements for the Guangzhou Biennale, the first large-scale exhibition of the modernist art movement (soon to be called “contemporary art”) in China since 1989 appeared, and these did not shy away from the market question which stimulated the enthusiasm of many young artists. Initially, the “Guangzhou Biennale” was where the pop art trend of Wuhan was first exhibited, and in 1993 pop art emerged as part of the “post-89 new art” in Shanghai and Beijing. Li Xianting used the term “Political Pop” to describe that art and its Zeitgeist:
Most Political Pop artists were born in the 1950s, which meant that they were influenced by a particular historical context and familiar with the “Cultural Revolution”; they understood its political background and had even experienced many historical events. The question for them now was how to farewell or critique this past history.
Artist Yu Youhan explained in July 1997:
I paint Mao Zedong, generally speaking, to depict China, her history, and my own experience of life. However, as an artist, this expression is what I like and what I am able to do. The period of Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening has provided Chinese artists with more room for their activities and this has enabled me to depict Mao Zedong, the most famous person in modern China, in my own style of artistic expression. My childhood and youth were in the Mao era, and I experienced the “Cultural Revolution”. In the “Cultural Revolution” period, there were photographic portraits of Mao Zedong everywhere in China. More than ten years later, when I recreate these photos, I believe art is a meaningful thing. I spontaneously think of a bust of Mao Zedong on Tiananmen his monochromatic uniform printed with designs, and when I look at this picture, I feel happier than ever. The painting expresses ideas I have stored in my heart for more than ten years but was never sure I could articulate. I think it is interesting that this painting contains a contrast between two eras: the contents of the Mao era, and the treatment of the era of reform and opening up.
In the art of Political Pop, the most familiar works are Wang Guangyi’s Great Criticism series. Wang Guangyi’s works concisely presented the two ideologies coexisting in China, as described by He Qingji in his “China’s New Art Post- 89”:
Political Pop is the interesting mix of socialism and capitalism, and I believe it is related to the rapid development of consumerist culture in recent years in China. It is interesting that Political Pop from time to time uses images of the “Cultural Revolution” period, and the “red, bright, and light” visual decoration. Political pop can conceal mockery, but the strength of its targeting and critique is difficult to ascertain.
The images in Great Criticism constructed from “workers, peasants and soldiers”, ubiquitous in the earlier “Cultural Revolution” period posters, were now placed in ambiguous juxtapositions of images used to attack the bourgeoisie and capitalist commodity advertising, thus providing people with schemata to freely interpret questions of reality. The unique style of such art was intended to be vastly different from the thematic modernism of the 1980s, and also to be fundamentally different from earlier paintings that used visual objects to form their language. Artists were no longer dependent on nature and objectivity, and they could directly appropriate and transform earlier cultural products to form their own artworks. This was an obvious extension of the art of Richard Hamilton and Andy Warhol. At the same time, the confusion implicit in the discussion on the purification of art language in the late 1980s was cleared up by such concepts of art, as for example by Li Shan’s use of photographs of Mao Zedong in his early years, though Li Shan eliminated Mao’s historical significance by applying makeup to his image. The artist’s image did not come from any image seen and relied exclusively on his selection and cropping of existing images to use in accordance with his own artistic views. Taking into account the dissemination in the early 1990s of Derrida’s deconstruction in Chinese academic circles, avant-garde circles in Hubei Province also liked to engage with his ideas, and we can also see these art concepts as stemming from the influence of postmodern philosophy.
The editor of Jiangsu Art Monthly, Gu Chengfeng wrote, when analyzing the background against which China Pop Art was produced:
Various media have increased the pace of change to an unprecedented extent, and the visual images produced by television, electronic games, copiers, faxes, advertising, karaoke, and beauty pageants have already transcended the scope of entertainment and consumption to impact deeply on a generation’s lifestyle and mode of thinking; culture is a fashion which is instantaneous, consumer-based, and superficial. Such a fashion not only constantly challenges orthodox culture, but demands to be expressed in the art of the day. This is the unique environment that produced Chinese pop art”. This specific environment translated the concepts of rapidity, immediacy, fame, popularity, and effect into the domain of art. In this sense Chinese Pop art corresponded to how Richard Hamilton casually described Pop art in the 1950s: “popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and Big Business”. [10]
As an art strategy, “Political Pop” can be regarded as one way in which the modernist art of the 1980s into a mainstream ideological trend as “contemporary art”. The political conflict and ideological challenge reflected in Political Pop works were strengthened as each side in the conflict perpetuated the strategic East-West confrontations in politics, culture and economics, and so extended its meaning. The presence of this logic and the political and ideological coloring of the artworks were relied upon by many Chinese avant-garde artists and critics as the point of departure and goal in marketing avant-garde art and this saw “Political Pop” flourish within a very short span of time.
As a stratagem of opposition to the political system in the 1990s, Political Pop was almost one of the few remaining stances of opposition to absolutism. However, it did not provoke any strong counterattack, and the center of political power in China never adopted any effective opposition to the attitudes of Political Pop. As party to the overall ideology, the authorities in the Chinese art world could only issue boring statements, [11] and were unable to initiate any sustained political movement as they had done in the past. This demonstrates that there was a noticeable change at this time in the discourse and system of authority in ideological and “political” debate. As the result of the introduction of a number of forces and of the increasing complexity of power structures (with elements that were domestic and international, political and economic, cultural and ideological, individual and collective, mental and physical), the intrinsically absolutist attitudes of both sides reached a de facto compromise in the context of the legitimization of the market.
Indeed, around 1992, there were tangible political compromises and changes at the center of state power, the major issue in the political life of the country was no longer whether social reform was necessary, but rather how reform could be carried out and who would hold the power to reform. This time people began to sense the vacuum created by the collapse in prices and the embarrassment of the disappearance of truth. In such a scenario, the narrative for the ambitious goals may be a vague shout or ridiculous struggle.
The art languages of Political Pop and of American Pop art were more or less similar. However, unlike works by Hamilton, Warhol, and Lichtenstein, the works by Chinese artists were more metaphorical and suggestive. In fact, the political significance of these pop art works was strengthened by ideological conflict. In China Times (March 18, 1993), an article titled “Speaking for Chinese Pop” hit out at Political Pop with ideology: “After 1989, artists in several places borrowed the corpse of Western Pop art to criticize or ridicule the soul of politics”; the artist speaking to the journalist in this interview was being doubly ironic in so describing the politics and consumerism he treated in his own Pop Art works.[12] For Chinese avant-garde artists and critics, the additional ideology undoubtedly had immediate benefits: by enhancing the “political” meaning, Pop Art works targeted ideology. The term “Political Pop” could be interpreted to mean “the politicization of pop art.”
Cynical Realism and Political Pop made use of the background provided by the market economy, to extend the reach of ideological management; given that there were no slogans or effective political terms, any method of metaphor, allusion, symbol, restructuring, appropriation, or bricolage could constitute a tool to be freely used by the artist. By about 1995, the styles of Cynical Realism and the “Gaudy Art” that perpetuated it and was even closer to consumer society merged. Throughout the 1990s, Chinese contemporary art was gradually beginning to be collected by Western museums and acquiring greater space in galleries, which provided conditions for contemporary art facing reduced opposition in China. In other words, official management structures in China lost control over art: the market classified everything as a commodity and even ideology was a commodity that could be traded freely. This social and political environment provided conditions for richer artistic practice, including performance art, art installations, audiovisual art, and mixed media. From after the mid-90s, Chinese contemporary art continued to spread under the influence of every form of Western art…Especially after 1993, artists could see any shows in foreign art museum, from classical art and modern art to contemporary art, from Rembrandt, Vermeer, Monet, Kandinsky, and Picasso to Jeff Koons, Matthew Barney, Damien Hirst, and Anselm Richter …
NOTES:
[1] The critics Gao Minglu and Zhou Yan, as well as the artist Xu Bing, went to the United States, while the critics Fei Dawei and Hou Hanru as well as the artist Huang Yongping went to France.
[2] “Letter to Yang Qian from Zhang Xiaogang (6 October)”, in Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996, Peking University Press, 2010, pp. 138-140.
[3] Yang Qian replied sympathetically in a letter of November 25: “I completely understand your situation. Here we all know about what is happening in China, but it’s not appropriate to talk about it here. The only solution I can see is that you leave. Wait until things improve next year. Maybe you could get to the West through the Spanish Embassy, and then come on to the US? After I get my green card, I will do whatever I can to help you. It seems like everyone in China is clamoring to go abroad, so getting a visa will be even harder in the future, so you will need to find a way”. “Letter from Yang Qian to Zhang Xiaogang (25 November)”, in Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996, Peking University Press, 2010, p.140.
[4] “Letter to Mao Xuhui from Zhang Xiaogang (18 December)”, in Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996, Peking University Press, 2010, pp.144-145
[5] Yi Ying discussed this phenomenon:
Unlike the Western modernism that completely wiped out the traditional academy system, Chinese new wave art was not in serious opposition to the system of college education that was in place, even though new wave art was something that did not fit into these art schools. It is interesting that many students of the Academy of Fine Arts could happily reconcile painting boring orthodox figures in their painting classes while busying themselves with modernist experiments outside school. There was a complex background to this phenomenon. It can be stated overall that on the one hand classes would cater to classicism, while on the other modernism came with a sense of urgency which in addition to social needs and market trends provided room for the survival of traditional skills of realism in Chinese colleges. This cannot be simply explained as a diversification of art styles, regardless of which it can be said that such a background created the conditions for the emergence and development of the neo-academic school of painting. The neo-academic school of painting that emerged within campus culture encompassed two layers of meaning: first, traditional academic techniques (regardless of whether they were Soviet-style or European style) played a role in and influenced students’ acceptance of modern culture; second, given China’s specific historical conditions, art college became a center of information about modernism and concepts of Western modern art were studied and absorbed in this environment, as well as being gradually integrated into art language of some young faculty members and their students. This second aspect of meaning was more significant. (Art Research, 1990:4, p.19.)
[6] Jiangsu Art Monthly, 1992:1, p.17.
[7] Lü Peng, A History of Art in Twentieth-Century China, Paris: Somogy, 2013, p.599.
[8] The term “cynical realism” first appeared in Li Xianting’s August 1991 essay titled “The Sense of Ennui and the Third Generation of Artists since the Cultural Revolution”. In early 1993, the inaugural issue of Genesis presented a column by Dao Zi titled “Café Guerbois”, which carried an article completed by Li Xianting in early 1992 titled “Post-Modern Tendencies in Chinese Art Circles since 1989”. To this article Li Xianting appended a footnote more fully explaining “Cynical Realism” and its historical and cultural connections with the concepts of “punkish humor” and “hooligan culture”.
[9] Genesis, no.1, 1993, p.44.
[10] Gu Chengfeng, “Chinese Pop Trends”, Chinese Art in the 1990s, 1990-1992, Urumqi: Xinjiang Fine Arts and Photography Press, p.92.
[11] In February 1997, Art Newsletter, the organ of the China Artists Association, published a speech by the painter Li Qi, renowned for having once painted Mao Zedong and later Chinese leaders, at the China Artists Association’s forum for learning from the spirit of the Chinese Communist Party plenum. This “authoritative figure” , who had lost his influence in the art world, attacked “Political Pop” in a speech titled “Open Your Eyes” and described how the problems created by this artistic phenomenon threatened the nation’s “spiritual civilization”. In his speech, Li Qi noted that “there were many Political Pop works in the Third National Exhibition of Chinese Oil Painting, which was supported by no less an institution than the Arts Council of the PRC Ministry of Culture”, and the “three curators of the Exhibition were no less than those officials of the Arts Council in charge of art’s reputation!” (Ref: Art Newsletter, February 1997, pp.3-5) The Arts Newsletter is the official bulletin of the art establishment, but the publication is only circulated to association members and has virtually no influence, so Li Qi’s remarks could not be disseminated effectively, unlike in the past when statements by such “authorities” would have carried weight.
[13] In an interview published in the English-language journal Window on 5 February 1993, under the title “A Reflection of Changing Times” Wang Guangyi talked about his paintings and the ideas behind them during his brief stay in Hong Kong in the week prior to publication:
“I used to believe in art for art’s sake, but not anymore,” says Wang, a tall northerner who sports a beard, something rarely seen among his fellow countrymen. “My paintings are my thoughts in picture form. Through Great Criticism, for example, I try to express my view on both the ideology of the Mao era and the current craze for Western consumer products in China. The paintings tease both. “Political or ideological movements have been so much a part of the Chinese life in the last few decades, pop art simply cannot escape it,” says Wang explaining his fascination with political themes.
“In fact I like Western consumer goods too,” he continues, taking a puff of a Yves Saint Laurent cigarette, “but at the same time I can’t help looking with a critical eye at the impact of Western pop culture upon Chinese youth nowadays. The worker-peasant-soldier images in my art were my way of expressing the paradox. I can’t say that my thoughts on this issue are crystal clear, but I feel it is the vagueness that inspires me in the first place.