Lü Peng × Wang Guangyi

Wang Guangyi: Art as a History of Critique

Prior to 1985 Wang Guangyi was an unknown art academy graduate in the art scene. It was not until he and other friends collectively organized the Young Northern Artists Group (Beifang Qingnian Yishu Qunti) that Wang Guangyi’s name began to be appear in various art journals and news publications. Originally, the Young Northern Artists Group was a spontaneously formed salon created by recent university graduates, including some from institutes of technology. Wang Guangyi later recalls that the group was not originally called the Young Northern Artists Group:

After graduating in 1984 and going back to Harbin, I often discussed literature and art with friends. Later our activities attracted the attention of Peng De, editor of Art Trends (Meishu sichao),the avant-garde theory journal at the time, who sent a letter requesting to know more about our group. At the time, we all thought it was a good chance to introduce the group to the whole country. After a discussion, we agreed on the name I suggested, Young Northern Artists Group, which we then relayed in a brief to Peng De. It was published in Art Trends and taken to the National Conference of Artists’ Representatives held in Shandong. After that, the Young Northern Artists Group’s name quickly became known and rather influential in art circles, although people knew little about the views of the group. It is ironic that although the Young Northern Artists Group name was well-known, they did not hold their first group exhibition, simply titled the Young Northern Artists Group Biennale, until February 1987, in Changchun. Participants included Wang Guangyi, Shu Qun, Ren Jian, Liu Yan, Ni Qi and Wang Yalin. Before that exhibition, they had held only one academic forum and several slide presentations. It was this exhibition that can now be regarded as the historical turning point for the group.

In fact, prior to that exhibition, people had been able to see a number of influential exhibitions and events, including the ’85 New Space exhibition (organized by Wang Guangyi's Zhejiang Art Academy classmates Zhang Peili, Zha Li and Geng Jianyi), the New Figurative Images exhibition (organized by young Yunnan artists Mao Xuhui and Pan Dehai, and young Shanghai artist Hou Wenyi), and the Jiangsu Modern Art Exhibition, initially sponsored by the young Nanjing artists Ding Fang and Chai Xiaogang.

In 1985, it was common for artists to provide obscure theoretical interpretations of their work. This trend was mainly due to the inability of young artists to gain critical approval and support for their new work. Critic Li Xianting published an article in Fine Arts in China (Zhongguo meishu bao, issue no.28) in 1986 in which he sympathetically addressed their anxiety: ‘[The young artists] love writing essays featuring obscure and abstract expressions, which indicates an advance in the emancipation of thought towards the philosophical level’. In his essay titled ‘It’s Not the Art That’s Important’ (Zhongyao de bushi yishu) Li typified the ’85 New Wave not as an actual art movement, but as a movement of ideological liberation. The difference between the ’85 New Wave art movement and either Scar Art or Lifestream Art (Shenghuoliu Yishu) was its relevance to philosophical issues. Indeed, the philosophical shift is a change in the perspective on the world, unlike the insistence on common human feelings or the protection of moral attitudes. Although Scar Art in previous years possessed poetic and tragic sentiments arousing a universal humanitarian sympathy, Scar Art mainly focused on earlier political realities. A typical example is Luo Zhongli’s huge sculpted bust of a peasant titled Father (Fuqin) that moved viewers to tears. In the wake of Scar Art, young Chinese artists began looking to the ideologies of various Western philosophers and psychologists, including Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Sartre and Freud, as tools for re-thinking artistic issues. As a result, artists in 1985 radically changed their understanding of artistic issues. The intelligentsia would certainly agree that influential Western thinking, encompassing everything from philosophy, culture, religion, art and economy to ethics, was fundamentally responsible for influencing China. But in art circles it was still difficult to find critics who illustrated this theoretical change in new artists’ works. As a result, it is understandable that artists who previously lacked cultural consciousness would make arduous efforts to elucidate their own new artistic language in order to gain universal acknowledgement, because as far as a Chinese audience was concerned, the various styles of Western modern art that emerged after impressionism were all completely new.

There is no doubt that Wang Guangyi was among those artists who emerged as a result of his philosophical writing. He published an article titled ‘What Kind of Painting Do We Need Now?’ (Women zhege shidai xuyao shenmeyang de huihua?) in the fourth issue of Jiangsu Art Monthly (Jiangsu huakan) for 1986, in which he argued that the present era’s requirement for painting in an evangelical tone like a savior announcing, ‘To paint is to convey and transmit sublime thoughts, not morbid or irritating ideas. Here the strength of the human spirit and beauty form a balanced tension within human society’. Years earlier, such a statement would be rare coming from a Scar Artist. The new generation of artists’ understanding of art through pondering obscure philosophy had changed. ‘A sense of truth’ (zhenshi ganshou) was regarded as worthless because of its lack of cultural meaning. However, Wang Guangyi’s statement that ‘our common goal as contemporary artists is to return to the beginning, and to uplift humanity and the natural harmony, in order to establish a new spiritual model’ was rather ambitious. Soon after, such swashbuckling statements appeared in another article by Wang Guangyi, ‘Art: A Form of Conduct for Humanity’ (Yishu: Zuo wei renlei de yizhong xingwei) published in the first issue of Art Trends for 1987. In that evangelizing article Wang Guangyi presents himself as a missionary to readers in the following sacred text:

Our purpose is to help humanity emerge from the mire of a terminally ill culture and to champion an inspiring and healthy cultural spirit.

So the time has finally come to uplift the spirit's inner strength concealed within the backdrop of culture.

In order ‘to greet all forms of life with delight’, we yearn to establish a new spiritual model for humanity, so that humanity can progressively advance. For this reason we oppose the terminally ill rococo art and all things unfavorable for the evolution of a healthy life. This kind of ‘art’ weakens humanity, leading people away from a healthy and human existence. The clamor of such moribund art prevents healthy people from heeding life's solemn, heavy and tragic inner calling…

The kind of art we need is filled with a passion for life and the vigorous affirmation of life. It is the grandest tragic art.

Wang Guangyi’s initial ideal was most definitely ‘a metaphysical hypothesis’. The terminally ill and the healthy cultures he refers to are not precisely defined. At this point, there is only one truth, which he wants to express and thereby bring forth new ideas. Spurred on by this very desire, he created his first batch of work, the Frozen Northern Wasteland (Ninggu de beifang jidi) series.

Wang Guangyi once remarked, ‘The north is the source of my creation. The scenes of the northern polar regions remind me of the primal forms of nature and humanity’. [1] This statement is a bit exaggerated, but it contains some truth. Wang grew up in the north and the unconscious influence on him of his surrounding environment is evident. His graduation project was completely derived from observations of the Oroqen ethnic group. Whether or not it was an original assignment, his frozen solid models with their gray-blue natural setting, figures and animals subtly evoke his basic feeling for the north. After graduation, Wang created a group of works, the Frozen Northern Wasteland series, in which we can see his ability to compose figures with simple and solid characteristics. These works also embodied a pure and veracious portrait of nature in the north where herdsmen’s cumbersome leather jackets and awkward poses enable us to feel the inherent character of the northern wilderness.

At a conference at the end of 1984 another artist from the Young Northern Artists Group proposed the existence of a ‘northern culture’. Thereafter, Wang Guangyi, as well as Shu Qun, Ren Jian and Liu Yan, widely discussed the implication of this hypothesis for artistic styles, such as the visual impression of the freezing cold. Motivated by a simple psychology regarding the uniqueness of a visual image, Wang Guangyi completed Frozen Northern Wasteland, No. 25, the first work in his series. He later recalled: ‘I stumbled on the polar images quite by accident, and had originally wanted to do something on paper, something unique, evoking an image. My first experiment was No.25, the very first work even though it was numbered 25. Some paintings with sheep were finished earlier, but because these animals did not live in the arctic, they were only brought into the series later. His earlier works naturally include No.1, No. 2, No.4 and so on. In No.25 Wang preserved the north’s natural characteristics, but included elements more obvious than in his former works. He went a step further to reduce those easily recognized figures and images associated with natural characteristics to the point of creating a pure and plain composition.

When we re-read Wang Guangyi’s proclamation of idealism we discover that he also sketched out a hypothetical idealist model as follows:

Such a painting with a sense of ascension superficially maintains the forms of the Strassburg Cathedral, rising into the sky as though by sheer persistence, splendid, grand and complex, to provide a lofty ideal of beauty proclaiming an eternal sense of the health and harmony of humanity. Here between the creator and his creation there is solemnity and dignity, a magnificence that is pleasing to the mind and eye.[2]

In the 18th issue of Fine Arts in China published in 1985, Wang Guangyi continued to insist that his ‘Frozen Northern Wasteland series was not pure painting, but a materialization of the uplifting thoughts of humanity’. While expounding on the Young Northern Artists Group’s views, Wang made an unsubstantiated statement that ‘Absolute Principle (Juedui yuanze,a work by Shu Qun) and his Frozen Northern Wasteland series are not art, but merely activities reflecting life’s inherent vitality’. Most works in the Frozen Northern Wasteland series were redrawn by the artist several years later due to the poor preservation and deterioration of the materials used in the originals.

During the creation of the Frozen Northern Wasteland series from 1984 to 1986, Wang Guangyi and many of his artistic and intellectual contemporaries possessed only an indirect sense of any historical responsibility towards artistic creation. As the ideological liberation movement developed, Wang and his artist friends hoped to transcend their own art to deliver what they believed to be salvation for humanity, although directed specifically at the traditional culture familiar to a Chinese audience. In the essay titled ‘Explanation of the Northern Art Group’ (Wei Beifang Yishu Qunti shanshi, hereafter Explanation) written by a key member Shu Qun, we can detect that among the young northern artists, including Wang Guangyi, there was a reaction against the artistic trend towards impulsive expressionism. In his essay ‘Spirit of the Northern Art Group’ (Beifang Yishu Qunti de jingshen), published in the no.18 issue Fine Arts in China in 1985, Shu Qun wrote: ‘We believe that Western culture has already disintegrated and the only substitute lies is a new cultural force, the birth of northern civilization’.

In Explanation Shu Qun further explained Northern Culture: ‘It is the culture at the rear of the Frigid Zone, being a name for the visualization of rational culture’. So the essence of Northern Culture was a type of rational spirit and in his explanatory notes the author explained that this type of rationality was not the same as ‘general rationality’; ‘it is an invariable spiritual principle’. The support for the theory and philosophy of this group can be clearly explained, because, as with the obscure manifestos and statements of other groups, the explanation of Shu Qun’s group was the very theory that their art required and, as was usual, in this search for a theoretical basis they were influenced by Western philosophers.

At the same time Explanation included some vague sense of a mission to lead the nation through art towards some kind of health and perfection. These artists believed that, in order to achieve this purpose, reason was very important. In emphasizing reason, the authors put forward two factors for consideration. On the basis of their sense of responsibility for rescuing the national spirit, elevating and establishing reason became their mission. Of course, Shu Qun was alert to the fact that the ‘reason’ or rationality he discussed was a type of Utopia, and the sacred hope of attempting to ‘restore those fine medieval qualities of piety, sincerity, charity and purity of soul to mankind’ could be nothing more than a hope.

Several years later Wang Guangyi remarked: ‘Making the Frozen Northern Wasteland our starting point showed our lack of awareness. In the first issue of Gallery of 1989 he wrote: ‘Loftiness of faith … is just a boring assumption’. However, while the works in the Frozen Northern Wasteland series might not have had any cultural meaning as their starting point, they reflect the artist’s sensitivity to imagistic language.

II

Until the end of 1986, Wang Guangyi’s metaphysical concepts were derived from a mixture of the philosophical ideas of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and earlier medieval philosophers. These effectively led the artist to search for a corresponding form of image presentation. Wang Guangyi believed that health was related to features such as stability, balance and symmetry whereas sublimity featured elements like elevation, solemnity and purity, and that these features and elements could be found in classical art. After Wang Guangyi transferred to the Zhuhai Art Academy he began to frequently examine albums of classical painting. By that time, he was reacting against modern art after reading too many works on the subject. In fact, as early as the second semester of his sophomore year in the art academy, Wang Guangyi shifted his interest from artists like Van Gogh, Matisse, Derain, Cezanne and Picasso, to artists such as Da Vinci, Poussin, and Ingres. He had kept his distance from classical art probably because he was caught up in the wave of modern art for such a long time, although Corot continued to be Wang Guangyi’s personal favorite and inspiration. Despite this personal preference for classical art, Wang Guangyi, as an artist who incessantly tried to establish a new form of artistic presentation and to become a ‘superman artist’ (chaoren yishujia), still felt helpless regarding his own status. He later recalled, ‘Back then, I didn’t know what to paint. I felt there was nothing to paint. I was kind of lost. Polemical issues were of no interest and all I could do was skim through art books’. At this point, the questions of what and how to paint once more began to concern Wang Guangyi.

In the process of imitating classical art, Wang Guangyi had reached a new turning point. He first reproduced in paint David’s The Death of Marat on a plywood panel, and in the process he eliminated details of the figures and the background, preserving only the general composition. At the same time, possibly inspired by the twin steeples of Strassburg Cathedral, he painted a second Marat dead in a bathtub symmetrical to the first, yet added colors that even David’s original work did not contain. The work was visually effective. This delighted him and on the reverse of the panel, he immediately arranged another composition with similar motifs, which was also intriguing in its effects. This ‘revisionist’ (xiugai) project was based on the ideas of E. Gombrich. Wang Guangyi explained: ‘Nietzsche teaches me how to get out of the dilemma I am in. Gombrich enlightens me on the modification and continuity of graphic culture’. [3]Through reading (the artist claims that during this period, he spent half the day painting and the other half reading), Wang Guangyi learned from Gombrich that we need pictorial models to describe the world. In his ill-favored article ‘Response to Three Questions’ (Dui sange wenti de huida) published in the 3rd volume of the journal Fine Arts (Meishu), Wang Guangyi made the following pessimistic statement: ‘Contemporary painters are very unfortunate. Once we sit in front of the canvas, it becomes a cultural backdrop and its purity disappears. But the painter still assumes that he is working on a blank slate in order to make himself and others believe that his compositions are original. This essentially challenges the impossible’. Gombrich’s idea of modifying traditional pictorial models greatly inspired him, and he concluded that modifying traditional images is the right thing for artists to do and perhaps creativity is merely the work of modification. Wang Guangyi produced his Post-Classical (Hou-gudian) series, ‘in order to make the spirit better known, because in human cultural history (I refer mainly to Western culture) a seed of sublime power exists’. [4]

In Wang Guangyi’s Post-Classical series, we find that he crammed in visual elements established in his Frozen Northern Wasteland series: the gray mood, cold atmosphere, and frozen models. In his Post-Classical series he derived images from classical archetypes (such as The Death of Marat and The Return of Tragic Love) and the more elaborate composition of the paintings were intended to evoke a spiritual state closer to states of solemnity, grandeur and sublimity. Hong Zaixin, a friend of Wang Guangyi engaged in art history research, once critiqued the Post-Classical series: ‘In a spiritual sense, the works give me the visual feeling of soaring grandeur, solemnity and sublimity. They seem to say that the side of the rational world is better than the side of the emotional world. In other words, in painting you do not express the feelings of an individual, but attempt to develop the will of a greater humanity’.

In his Post-Classical series, The Return of Tragic Love was highly esteemed and praised. The act of ‘return’ in his artistic rationale possessed a tragic sense of good and evil. Rembrandt regarded the universal love of Christianity to be the supreme goal of artists; through his exceptional visual language, this idea passed down from the Dutch master to Wang Guangyi who had given up on originality but also wanted to attain this highest goal. As a result, Wang Guangyi made Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son the basis for his composition.

Relative to other Post-Classical series works, Behind Mona Lisa (Mengna Lisha zhi hou) has more naturalistic details and appeal. However, more than other Post-Classical works, this painting also reveals Wang’s awareness of Duchamp’s rationale. Wang Guangyi recalls, ‘Mona Lisa represents the ideal facade of humanity, but I wonder what is behind her? Others might also ask the same question. Da Vinci’s painting is a masterpiece and so is Duchamp’s’. Since no one sees what is behind the Mona Lisa, the revelation of that may have extraordinary effects. In fact, after Wang Guangyi attended the Zhuhai Academy of Painting he became interested in artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Franz Kline. ‘When there was nothing to paint, Duchamp thought of a good idea which inspired other people’; Wang Guangyi respected Duchamp’s anti-art heroism so much that he paid Duchamp this aesthetic tribute.

The Post-Classical series remains highly significant throughout Wang Guangyi's art career. Its significance does not simply lie in the artist’s creation of unique and distinct images, but more importantly in his reflection and resolve to challenge the issues of art against the backdrop of art history. Furthermore, because Wang Guangyi’s work is deeply imbued with history, it made him recognize the dangers of ‘the classicist complex’ (gudian qingjie).

III

In the preceding section we referred to Wang Guangyi’s friend, art historian Hong Zaixin who initially praised the Post-Classical works. But when we continue to read that essay, we discover the scholar’s dissatisfaction with works embodying a conceptual rationale:

My opinion is not about the painting, but about the conceptual composition. As I have already said, there are not limitless interpretations to compositional schemata, because the expressive force of a painting language has various limits. If you intentionally create a feeling of absence in a painting, as in Black Logic: Pathological Analysis A (Heise lixing: Bingli fenxi A) and Black Logic: Pathological Analysis B (Heise lixing: Bingli fenxi B), this clearly indicates that you have lost your grasp of the spirit of logic and only show a grasp of the compositional schema. If you unintentionally take this step, it is even more unsettling because it makes all of the optimistic energy of your former series look depleted.

Actually, Hong Zaixin did not pay attention to the conceptual turn behind Wang Guangyi’s Feeling of Absence (Kuikonggan) which had its origins in Wang’s extreme suspicion of metaphysics. A post-classical aesthetic does actually exist in the work, and the revisionism that results from his raising and answering his own hypothetical thesis is also in itself a kind of aesthetic trap. Of course that also includes the subconscious expression of his immature period that produced this mythical illusion, just as the artist described his iconography: ‘Several years later all of the Post-Classical series of works that I did were a kind of expression of mythical expectation and revisionist feeling’. The revised compositional schema of the Post-Classical series should be seen as his first steps towards the development of an interest in cultural problems, and his Rationality (Lixing) series represents the first critical attempt by the artist to break through these cultural hypotheses.

Wang’s earliest motivation in painting the Rationality series was to expand visual feeling, in order to reduce the formal nature of the composition. In that way, the possibility of continuing with the original composition while retaining pathological elements was weakened as the artist was opposed to sentimental elements. After 1986, the ideas of Kline, Warhol and Duchamp gradually crept into the artistic purpose of the Chinese contemporary artists who had a direct influence on Wang Guangyi. The ‘feeling of absence’ in his Rationality series was due to his imminent, but not yet fully achieved, break with ‘the classicist complex’. Aside from the areas of individual influence and special consideration, the main reason Wang Guangyi had still not shed his illusory vision was partly the result of his advocacy of a rationalist spirit. On the one hand, Wang Guangyi consciously applied a continuous revisionist or progressive critique of traditional culture. On the other hand, in drawing inspiration from Hegel and Nietzsche for his works, these ideas in fact could not bring rationality to the contemporary issue of artistic language. Therefore, in his composition, Wang Guangyi continued to preserve his original and unquestioning critical outlook based on revisionist compositional schema. Yet he also draws on a conceptual form that is both streamlined and intensified. To put it simply, ‘the feeling of absence’ is the manifestation of a meaningful trend: the elimination of aestheticism or emotion. On a deeper level, ‘the feeling of absence’ is the critique of a hypothetical ‘rational spirit’.

In his Rationality series Wang Guangyi transcended the confines of aestheticism. The conflict or problem expressed in this series is that the nominal rationale is both the point of departure for this series and also the object towards which the critical compass of this series points. Rationality in this series only appears to induce critique and negation. In contrast to the Post-Classical series where rationality became part of the new compositional schema and aesthetic attention, here the concept and the compositional schema surprisingly reach an interesting consensus in which the critique and negation of this period were tremendously important. Immediately thereafter, the artist used the new myth of rationality to replace the older one, and in spite of this was very harsh towards the original classical forms.

IV

The new compositional schema that followed after this revisionist approach to the classical compositional foundation was another critique and negation of his Rationality works. Using a concrete manifesto form of symbolism, these works are the start of Wang Guangyi’s work towards ‘cleaning away humanistic enthusiasm’ (qingli renwen reqing), an idea first raised at the Huangshan Modern Art Studio Workshop (more often known simply as the Huangshan Conference) in November 1988. This meeting provided the conceptual basis and organization for the China Avant-Garde new art exhibition in February 1989. At the time of that exhibition, Wang Guangyi said in an interview with China Youth Daily (Beijing qingnian bao), ‘The important work I’ve started this year is to clarify the dilemma of the art world being guided by illogical humanistic enthusiasm’. Two months later, the artist summarized the third period of his artistic outlook in a dialogue in Gallery (Hualang) magazine, published by Lingnan Fine Arts Publishing House in Guangdong: ‘In the third phase of my art career from 1988 to 1989, I began to have doubts about the first two periods of my career. [5] All of the lofty convictions and cultural revisionism were not only a boring illusion, but a human passion led by my extremely unordered development. Now I’m doing important work to clarify this. But clarity gives rise to the overabundant meanings presented by illogical humanistic enthusiasm…’ Halfway through 1989, ‘cleaning away humanistic enthusiasm’ became a popular catchphrase used throughout the Chinese art world, and his work Mao Zedong was exhibited at the China Avant-Garde exhibition in February, adding various connotations to his formulation.

From the perspective of most contemporary Chinese, all of the modern myths created around Mao Zedong turned him into a cultural and political phenomenon unsurpassed in history. This fact was further confirmed by the Mao Zedong craze from 1988 to halfway through 1989. In this period, Mao emblems and every kind of essay, diary, and account of the man could be seen throughout the cities and countryside, recalling the extreme use of Mao’s image many years earlier. Mao Zedong’s image and the social issues that it represented provided new research material for sociologists, economists and political scientists. At the same time this phenomenon also marked a critical turning point for artists.

Initially Wang used a ready-made printed image of Mao Zedong as a symbol of rationality and this changed the relationship to the reproduced image. A line from Wang’s controversial essay ‘Answers to Three Questions’ (Dui sange wenti de huida) proves useful here:

The spirit on the canvas is a problem of stuffing, we want to stuff lots of provisions in our hemp sack and then hoist it over our shoulder and head off. At this time artists use the canvas in the same way as people use sacks. Of course, some artists become curious and maybe at some point spend ages staring at the undulations of the canvas, and even see a spirit in it. But it is only because of this type of attitude that they can be artists. Artists conscientiously cram things in. The thought that the canvas possesses a spirit is the artist’s accident, and a painting that possesses spirit is therefore inevitably the result of something the artist crammed in. Creative work is simply stuffing things in.

Such a statement is certainly not a result of the artist’s curiosity, and it has as its larger artistic cultural background some idea of a ‘cultural casino’. It was mainly a result of the enlightenment Wang Guangyi derived from Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns that he absorbed conceptual and popular art theory. At this time Wang had already moved towards using his artistic language as a means of eliminating problems of realism, and he also attempted to ‘neutralize’ language during that period. So the elimination of meaning in conceptual and popular art was mostly directed towards a contemporary and purifying attitude that had produced his artistic logic. From 1985 onwards, the tide of abstract expressionism brought by Robert Rauschenberg converged with sentimentalism, nihilism and the fevered reality of modern religious awareness to form the very overabundant matrix of meanings of which Wang Guangyi had spoken. As previously mentioned, the real problem of politics touched on by the Mao Zedong motif convinced the artist that this issue was to be his starting point. In the no.11 issue of Fine Arts in China in 1989, Wang Guangyi wrote in a short essay:

My intention was to use Mao Zedong to create a foundational method for ‘cleaning away humanistic enthusiasm’ but after Mao Zedong was shown in the China Avant-Garde exhibition it was received with a hundred times more enthusiasm, endowing the piece with even greater meaning.

Later, the artist recalled:

Mao Zedong was about the problem of politics. Although at that time I avoided that issue, it was in fact a reference to it. But at that time I thought of using artistic methods to solve the problem yet a neutral stance would have been better because that is a more artistic stance.

People also thought that Wang Guangyi’s reason for ‘cleaning away humanistic enthusiasm’ was because he thought excessive humanist passions impeded progress in artistic culture, and weakened the purity of art. The goal of ‘cleaning away humanistic enthusiasm’ was to get away from questions of art and reality. Therefore, critics who lacked academic sensitivity and knowledge easily mistook these symbols as being identical to the more common purist art language of 1988. Therefore, while presenting these as symbols, the artist was at the same time making people directly relate to the problem of the image as reality, causing an international and national sensation in the art world.

For Wang Guangyi, the process of painting Mao Zedong was very peaceful and he describes it as the most ordinary of projects. First a copy of Mao Zedong’s portrait was made, then enlarged onto the canvas, and painted over from left to right. After the paint dried, a black grid was then slowly added with a straight drafting tool, followed by writing ‘AO’ and ‘OA’ marks at the corners of the work.

Like the works of Warhol, Lichtenstein and Rosenquist, Wang Guangyi’s Mao Zedong series was also conscientiously and fastidiously done, adding a post-classical air to Mao Zedong’s image. The artist calmly used a ruler to add his red and black grids (three paintings were done with black grids and two with red), which although different from the grids in the Rationality series, were still a continuation of them.

From 1988 to halfway through 1989, all sorts of heretical ideas were being expressed in the political, economic and cultural arenas, and the ‘new authoritarianism’ (xin quanwei-zhuyi) suggested by his Mao Zedong series was criticized for being a farce in the middle of a real political struggle, but Wang Guangyi had nothing to do with ‘new authoritarianism’. Nevertheless, the controversy raised by his Mao Zedong series was closely related to the background of society at the time. It is the context of the reality and culture of that period that imbued the work with meaning. At the vetting preview, an examination committee representative questioned the use of grids. Fine Arts (Meishu) magazine editor Shao Dazhen, partial to New Wave artists, argued in defense of the work and represented the artist by explaining that making the grids was a kind of ‘rationality’ of objective appreciation. Afterwards, the examination committee representative also asked about the connotations of the ‘AO’ marks in the corners. Because of the excessive confusion about the textual meaning of the ‘AO’ characters, the representative raised an arbitrary formula for revision: firstly, change the ‘O’ to a different character and, secondly, the artist must write something very obvious to ‘express Mao Zedong’s greatness’ in English. In order to allow the work to be exhibited, Wang Guangyi changed the ‘O’ to a ‘C’, because it was easiest to just add black to one side of the ‘O’. As for the obvious expression in English, it was actually Gao Minglu who drafted it and Hou Hanru who translated it to English. At the time of the exhibition, this small amendment was placed to the side of Mao Zedong. It appeared to make a deep impression on people, and read: ‘A great figure should undergo objective and serious appraisal’. The American magazine Time used this sentence as the headline in its report on the exhibition. The report said that this series of paintings issued ‘an invitation to viewers to more closely consider the influence of Mao on the history of modern China’. This proved that the small announcement produced the desired result for English-language viewers, but for Chinese viewers, their understanding was subject to the realities of China:

Maybe those grids are some sort of bars. For so many years we said that Mao Zedong was the closest family member of them all, so maybe this is a kind of railing separating us from him? In reality Mao wasn’t like that. Maybe he was covering something up then? Why are there three paintings? It makes people feel that the shadow of such a sovereign from the heavens as Mao Zedong is still present everywhere…I don’t see the grids as coordinates, they are actually barbed wire. This side of the barbed wire is real life, that side is history. Mao Zedong has already passed to that side. We should see him as history.

These comments, published in the weekend edition of Farmer’s Daily (Nongmin ribao), clearly demonstrate that perhaps the impression Mao Zedong made on audiences may not have been what the artist expected.

The political system that could generate such absurdities sometimes also seemed to provide space for independent activities, such as allowing Wang Guangyi to use the Zhuhai Painting Academy to organize and hold the 1985 Art Movement and Large-Scale Slide Exhibition Art Forum in a small seaside town with little cultural profile. However, the period during which the artist was given such free space was so short that he was almost penniless by the end of that year.

V

As Wang Guangyi’s art cut into questions of reality, he also dispelled the un-provable and unreliable realm of metaphysics. This is an important feature of Wang Guangyi’s concept of ‘cleaning away humanistic enthusiasm’ and is clearly reflected in his Mao Zedong works. This thematic pursuit is better reflected in his subsequent works such as Highly Flammable and Explosive (Yiran yibao), Sacred Babies in Mass Production (Piliang shengchan de shengying) and Masterpiece Covered by Quick Drying Industrial Paint (Bei gongye kuaiganqi fugai de minghua).

In fact, after 1988, the artist’s vision distinctly changed. In a departure from anything he had previously done, Wang Guangyi abandoned metaphysical ontology in his artwork, and focused his energy on ‘analyzing the language of art’, an undertaking which could never be considered metaphysical.

In 1991 Wang Guangyi clearly articulated his artistic philosophy. In his view, all art can be divided into two categories: classical art and contemporary art. If one were to divide the two, World War II could be considered the dividing line. Wang Guangyi bundled all of the modern schools of art that existed prior to the war into the category of classical art. He believed that classical art grew out of ordinary or individual emotions and stated: ‘I consider things that are intimately linked with an individual’s emotions to be in a classical state’. This reveals how Wang Guangyi chose his images, style and linguistic symbols. Whether reflecting on issues of religion, mythology or reality, Wang Guangyi made value judgments about common human emotions. He maintained that classical artists, such as Poussin and Ingres, as well as renaissance artists, did not directly depict real life. While god, religion and mythology were remote from the artists’ direct experience, they were all themes that artists sought to manifest, based on their underlying common emotions, including meditations on metaphysics and a religion. Classical artists naturally adhered to certain codes, but these codes were built on metaphysical concepts. Moreover, artists saw themselves as having achieved these metaphysical ideas through their work—they were passionately devoted to realizing this nonexistent ‘rationale’.

In Wang Guangyi’s view, what is known as modern art is actually the closest reflection of personal and common emotions. Wang Guangyi stated: ‘Modern and classical art are the same thing. The artists all start from ideas that are closest to their own personal experience and advance towards a single objective. However, the objective is illusory. These artists paint from their emotions’. To some extent, modern art is more ambiguous than classical art. Most modern artists still incline towards metaphysical ontology and look to art to resolve the ultimate or central questions in life. However, because human emotions, consciously or unconsciously, seep into art criticism, they fog the critics’ understanding of the human culture of the time.

In contrast to classical art, contemporary art seeks to remove the fog around cultural issues. As Wang Guangyi declared in 1989, ‘first clean yourself up’ (shouxian qingli zishen), by which he meant that when artists are engaged in producing artwork (an activity that Wang Guangyi viewed as work which possessed academic importance), they must get rid of any personal emotions that are unrelated to the work. Wang Guangyi stated plainly: ‘Contemporary artists do not work from close personal experiences or from issues that are easy to handle. Rather, they seek to address past problems in art history; and they work from these problems, putting them in a larger cultural context and thus face challenges from different schools’. In response to this problem, ‘artists should find a breakthrough point which has nothing to do with personal experience, despite the fact that passion and personal experience are interrelated’. Wang Guangyi went as far as to say, ‘the problems contemporary culture must solve have nothing to do with personal emotion’. It is quite rare for Chinese contemporary artists to separate personal emotions so distinctly from cultural issues. While discussing his injunction to clean away humanistic enthusiasm in 1989, Wang Guangyi also stated: ‘The essence of contemporary art is the blind spot of meaning, which is achieved by depending on the analysis and treatment of artistic language. Artworks possessing a blind spot in meaning will impair the judgment of contemporary people’. He subsequently pointed out that ‘the problem of the blind spot in meaning is essentially a problem of contemporary art language…’ As we have pointed out, the artist regarded the issue of artistic language as the most significant problem in today’s art (contemporary art). A conception similar to Derrida’s deconstruction is revealed here when Wang Guangyi tries to replace the metaphysical essence of art with the blind spot in meaning and then to take control of this blind spot by analyzing and dealing with art language. In the eyes of the artist, the issues of ontology, ultimate judgment and absolute meaning are temporarily suspended. Thus, art works possessing ‘a blind spot in meaning’, which will ‘encumber the sense of judgment of contemporary people’ (including that of many critics), do not qualify as art within the commonly accepted meaning of art. Such works do not necessarily mean anything. The concepts of ‘essence’, ‘existence’, ‘conception’, ‘belief’, ‘beauty’, and ‘eminence’ become meaningless nonsense or become irrelevant. The works also do not resolve or control anything. They no longer re-create or represent particular scenes, emotions, feelings or even nothingness. As a result, they are open to any style or material. They can be works of visual language, but they are not limited by stylistic issues or by the material’s significance. Light is shed on his ideas by the process of creation of his series of works titled Highly Flammable and Explosive, which initially were mixed media objects. The process of creating these works was quite simple. On black wrapping he wrote symbols reminding people of his previous works. After the latter half of 1989, this series of works embodied meanings that were not difficult to gauge. He began the series in March 1989, but the period from the second half of 1988 to the beginning of 1989 was chaotic, turbulent and disturbed. Danger and vitality were interwoven with the unknown. For viewers, Highly Flammable and Explosive is hard to explain and quite confusing, a riddle whose meaning was being deconstructed from its inception.

Throughout 1985, Wang Guangyi devoted himself to painting, making his art work different from that of his classmates Wu Shanzhuan, Zhang Peili, and Huang Yongli. Perhaps at first he brought a spirit of classicism to this work, although he later regarded classicism as a flamboyance that pointed to metaphysical and ideal visualized states, at least when classicism referred to his own painting. According to Wang, ‘the language of classical art is culture-specific, while contemporary art superficially attempts to realize linguistic issues from a mixture of the classical and modern. Naturally the question arises of whether or not these issues can be resolved on the canvas’. For many artists and critics, painting lacked contemporary significance. Wang Guangyi of course did not believe this to be a problem when the materials themselves were not relevant to the language problem. The role of language is only a problem when we regard it as such. His ideas are quite clear after 1989:

Everyone must find an appropriate method. I may use canvas or mixed media, either way it doesn’t matter… This is not to say that performance art is more avant-garde than mixed media, nor that mixed media is more advanced than painting. That is irrational. Even the action of rolling around may embody the classicist complex. As long as the starting point of the art is classicism, then your performance will be still considered classical. For example, if each of us has a lump of clay, and you mold it according to classical rules, while I shape it according to contemporary rules, then our results will be totally different. As we mold the clay into different shapes, although our behavior of molding is the same, the different starting points for the two lumps of clay will embody different cultural identities.

Of course different cultural identities are not a result of pre-established and distinct meanings nor do they result from the differences in the starting point of reality, existence. The main idea is that in any material constituting a work or an artistic sign, the meaning, if there is any, is derived from the ‘chessmen’. As soon as the ‘chessmen’ fall into the metaphysical abyss, the work loses its authenticity. In conclusion, the effect of works which take emotions, impulses or beliefs as their starting point can be discounted, regardless of the form, material or manner in which they were created.

The artist clearly points out that something is wrong with the ‘language’ related to metaphysical ontology. According to Wang Guangyi, the art issues popular in the 1985 period, such as human problems, the liberation of thought and the value of existence, have all lost their precise pertinence for art, and so he distanced them from his own work. From this perspective, those artists devoted to these problems automatically renounce their qualifications as contemporary artists. Wang Guangyi agreed with philosophers such as Derrida on the basic point that even Heidegger’s anti-Hegelian existentialism falls into the abyss of onto-theology that cannot be proven false. ‘Anti-Hegelian philosophers before Derrida and Foucault still have an absolute spirit, even they might not have used that term. Heidegger’s concepts of existence and nonexistence are very complex, but they are still similar to Hegel’s philosophy, in that Heidegger divides the absolute spirit into a hierarchy of different lesser levels’. Yet a persistent attitude towards contemporary culture nevertheless constitutes a kind of value judgment, and this problem can only be resolved with reference to the ever-changing rules of the ‘cultural casino’. The moves (choices) on the chessboard in the artist’s mind are clear. This is a psychological chessboard formed by different forms of cultural directedness, the authenticity of which is proved by the phenomenon of different choices of linguistic meaning based upon it. ‘When a linguistic problem is gradually resolved, we draw closer to the essence of the individual human being. Once the obscurity is dispelled, the basic reason for human existence becomes clear’. This kind of language assumes cultural meaning the moment it is articulated. It is not a preserved formal shell. In other words, it derives from the solutions to cultural and historical problems, but is not the outcome of the elimination of thematic meanings as they are commonly understood (such an outcome is either nonexistent or unable to become the thing we called ‘language’). Thus, these two trains of thought reveal that Wang Guangyi’s notions of ‘cleaning away humanistic enthusiasm’ and ‘purifying language’ are completely different. What is considered most distinctive about ‘purifying language’ is that language is regarded as an outer shell disassociated from ideology which artists can either clean up or adorn, whereas ‘cleaning away humanistic enthusiasm’ targets existing critical issues within philosophical approaches.

In 1990 Wang Guangyi left the Zhuhai Academy of Painting and began to teach in the art department of a branch of the Hubei Polytechnic University in Wuhan. During this period, his works reflect his idea of combining Gombrich’s pictorial revisionism and Derrida’s deconstruction, especially in the series titled Masterpiece Covered by Quick Drying Industrial Paint. He believed that contemporary people excessively analyzed classical culture and that writings about classical culture were becoming increasingly voluminous. In fact, ‘contemporary interpretations of classical culture will submerge it in the end’, so that it will cease to exist. Wang Guangyi’s consideration of this problem is quite interesting for its bias and assumptions; he maintains a simple deconstructionist attitude towards classical culture and gradually covers a masterpiece of painting, a section at a time, until the masterpiece is completely concealed. As in the production of other series of works, Wang Guangyi first conducted small-scale experiments. He first carefully covered a printed version of a famous painting with quick-drying industrial paint, and when the paint was nearly dry, he drew signs in the painted area reminiscent of his own earlier series of works. He also experimented with music scores and titled the series Music Masterpiece Covered by Quick Drying Industrial Paint (Bei gongye kuaiganqi fugai de mingqu). Then he began to produce large-scale oil paintings. Masterpiece Covered by Quick Drying Industrial Paint: Michelangelo and Masterpiece Covered by Quick Drying Industrial Paint: Delacroix, both convey a relaxed aesthetic feeling. They are works intended for enjoyment, rather than understanding or interpretation. The series of covered masterpieces reveals a deep-seated aesthetic complex, which contradicts his ideas of conceptualism and deconstruction, yet the works maintain a strong pop flavor.

Wang Guangyi expressed the following opinion about the characteristics of contemporary art: ‘Contemporary artists do not individually resolve a problem. Rather, several artists cooperate to solve a single problem. Classical art deals with a grand issue, while contemporary art only deals with specific parts of the grand issue. These specific issues provide contemporary artists with the space to display their skills’. This idea was in sharp contrast to the conception of idealism that prevailed several years previously. Wang Guangyi’s work Sacred Infants in Mass Production demonstrates that ‘human problems’ had been replaced by ‘the population problem’. In the eyes of those artists who regarded art as a moral weapon and those critics who continued to publicize ‘the grand soul’, this work of Wang Guangyi represented degeneration, or at least an abrogation of the artist’s responsibilities. We see that after Wang Guangyi gave up studying eternal and expansive philosophical issues and accepted and put into practice a different philosophical ideology. He subjected his own artistic work to the call for verification characteristic of Karl Popper and to elements of deconstructionism.

At the end of 1989, Wang Guangyi wrote in a letter:

In my opinion, prior to the 20th century the problem of contradiction did not exist for artists. Artists had psychological balance due to their common faith and constructive cultural commonality. But in the twentieth century, especially after the 1970s, the deconstruction of cultural commonality and the irrational development of human passions led to imbalance in artists’ minds, which greatly enriched contemporary art culture. Because I present the ‘cleaning up of humanistic enthusiasm’ not as an eternal problem, what I propose possesses even more significance. I don’t think staunch faith is a good characteristic for an artist; firmness of faith shows that an artist cannot transcend previous emotions. To be an artist with a contemporary sense one must accept the harsh truth that eternal problems that cannot be proven false are meaningless, while resolving concrete problems is practicable. Cleaning away humanistic enthusiasm is a concrete problem, and I could spend another three years working to verify this issue.

VI

In the October 1990 edition of Jiangsu Art Monthly (Jiangsu huakan), Wang Guangyi wrote:

Artists who experience a shared delusion will take that mirage as empirical evidence. From this starting point, they generate a mutually conceived mythology in which all experiences are handled in an exaggerated or amplified humanistic manner. When an artist is engulfed in this artificial realm of reality, he undoubtedly believes the ‘myth’. From the renaissance until today, this mythical feeling deluded many artists into believing that they were conducting a conversation with the same myth or spirit. At the end of the 20th century, some European artists began to express doubts about these myths, often subconsciously, like the avant-garde artist Joseph Beuys, who would often mistakenly enter the myth’s murky depths. This type of tragedy was the result of succumbing to modern artistic language. Actually, it is in the perpetuation and embodiment of the language of artistic representation that modern and classical art share a common origin. To some extent, we should toss aside humanity’s passion for and dependency on art and, instead, closely examine art’s meaning. When we start to seek solutions to artistic questions, we should attempt to establish the logic and evidence in earlier cultural facts, and see artists how once used this experiential material to establish an artistic language and background. If we discover that both ‘classical art’ and ‘modern art’ left behind many questions for contemporary artists, then every individual artist is free to choose and discover problems and regard them as the logical starting point for their own work.[6]

When Wang Guangyi published this essay, he had already moved from Zhuhai to Wuhan for work. The journal in which this article was published also included his painting experiments on printed versions of famous masterpieces and music scores. At this time, he confined the scope of his work to ready-made products, which began to draw criticism concerning his views on the aestheticism of paintings and the characteristics of his own paintings.

During the early 1990s, artistic theory critiquing what was referred to as ‘the ’85 complex’ began to emerge. This suspicious conceptual shift did not result from the progressive logic of academic circles, but was produced by the real-life failure of the spirit of modernism. During the 1980s, moral and philosophical judgments of the ’85 period were often mixed together, and for this reason, questions of life and death became limitless and open-ended. Undoubtedly, questions of life and death were important in modern life philosophy, but Chinese artists were facing an even more pressing question: Under what circumstances can the ‘human question’ raised by speculations on life and death bring about an acknowledgment of humankind’s common worth? How do we measure problems of life and politics? After 1989, this fictitious ultimate goal, ‘the grand soul’ (da linghun) as the critic Li Xianting once put it, became suspect, which also led to the authenticity of ideals coming under suspicion. Once the ideals of liberation and enlightenment introduced by existentialism had failed, sensitive artists began to ponder the meaning of existentialism, eventually leading them to abandon these ideals altogether. With reality staring them in the face, artists no longer ‘preached’ in a sacred and serious manner as they had previously done, and realized instead that there is no ‘meaning’ that is serious, truly rational or cannot be called into question. The only real thing is the success of facts. Otherwise, our discussions are nothing more than an illusory satisfaction mutually generated by the educated. In the summer of 1991, Wang Guangyi argued that mythology based on concrete evidence must be created. This so-called truth was really just an ordinary rock, and culture was only a snowball formed around this rock. He said that the significance of human beings lies in the production of the snowball forming the cultural facts of history. As in Camus’ myth of Sisyphus, there is no real destination, just a process. He said that the important thing is we must allow this ‘rolling snowball’ to gather force and allow ourselves to perceive and be bewildered by this event! Metaphysical pursuits were no longer important, according to Wang Guangyi.

From a deep commitment to grand narration to an eventual withdrawal from existentialism, Wang Guangyi became sensitive to questions concerning reality. From an idealistic standpoint, he had already abandoned existentialism and begun to pay attention to more concrete questions arising out of reality. In January 1991, after the magazine Painter (Huajia) had stopped publication for almost one year, Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House started a new magazine titled Art • Market (Yishu • Shichang). [7] From its inception, the editors of the magazine were clearly attempting to use price to verify the value of art works, thus replacing artistic value with ‘efficiency’:

Art in contemporary society faces circumstances unlike in any other period in history. Art’s value must go through pricing in order for its full expression to be realized, even though art’s value and its price are not strictly limited to economic meaning. From this standpoint, the buying and selling of works of art become not only the work of art brokers, but also of art galleries, art dealers and artists themselves. Therefore business efficiency provides a fundamental prerequisite for artistic verification. In today’s society, where a culture of economic verification is lacking, it is remarkable that this melding of economics and art has been effective.

The editors of Art•Market, ambitious and full of idealism, had poetic fantasies about the market. No matter how you looked at it, an important message came out of their manifesto-like opening salvo, and Chinese artistic circles had become aware of the possibility that the power of the market had the potential to legitimize and internationalize modern art. The artist presented in the first article in the first issue was none other than Wang Guangyi, seen as representative of the ’85 New Wave Art Movement. In answering the editor’s questions, Wang made the following prediction:

At the present moment, contemporary art has yet to garner the same status it currently holds among academic circles. The reasons for this are complex, but chief among them is the fact that it has no robust nation-wide support. After the war, the success of American artists like Pollock and de Kooning was in essence the success of the corporate nation, and it would not have been so without national corporate support. You just used the term ‘art industry’. This is fitting, because it touches on questions dealing with circulation and cycles. The way I look at it, you must be part of the cycle in order to get connected and create meaning. We have already started to participate, and I believe in the next five years Chinese ‘products’ will play a decisive role in the realm of the world art industry.[8]

In response to the editor’s questions, Wang Guangyi also touched on the question of art law: ‘I cannot imagine an art market without some law for art. This kind of general knowledge is taken for granted in the West, but in China, once the market is legitimized and developed, many Chinese artists will find this new system completely foreign, and even be unaware of it’. Nevertheless, Wang Guangyi’s sensitivity might have influenced what many Chinese artists were starting to feel regarding the market:

I believe money and art are both good. Mankind worked for thousands of years to discover the joy and contentment art and money can bring. Artists and ordinary people are very much alike; they both love money, but the difference is that ordinary people use money to live a luxurious life, and artists use it to preserve a mythological image: The more charming the myth, the more valuable his or her works become. There is a law whereby metaphysical myth turns into secular myth at work in this process, and these two processes have reciprocal relationships that advance the process of art. We could say that this is the thesis and antithesis phenomenon or the Matthew effect that determines the birth and extinction of myth for artists, critics and the art market.[9]

Wang Guangyi even suggests that China may soon spend more money to purchase those works of her contemporary artists from abroad soon. His intuitive sensitivity has been confirmed with time.

One of Political Pop’s most famous pieces, Wang Guangyi’s Great Critique (Da pipan, 1990) was initially was not well received by critics, who felt that the combination of Cultural Revolution oil paintings with commercial logos totally diminished the work as a painting. However, Wang Guangyi was not interested in the historical aspects of the work; he wanted his work to be devoid of any kind of meaning, as a kind of non-artistic possibility. In the Beijing Youth Daily on 22 March he stated:

There are some matters that cannot be determined by an individual’s will. Once my works and my words leave me, they become a pop product. Perhaps this is why contemporary art is able to get close to people’s everyday lives and arouse people’s interest. As far as Chinese contemporary art is concerned, I have always believed there are only two kinds of art: art for aristocrats, which can be characterized as scholarly, and art for the poor, which is characterized by individuals expressing emotions that tend towards the dangerous. In fact, I look at contemporary art as a kind of shared public experience in which reorganization is achieved. Art is like a large-scale game compelling us to join in. From the outside, the public isn’t sure what the game’s true features are, just as though they are watching the evening news on TV. But what is clear is that contemporary art always reminds the public of one fundamental point: news and games are leading us towards real life.

At the end of 1990, after Great Critique appeared, Wang Guangyi made the following statement:

Great Critique might easily fall into a trap of misrepresentation by taking historical material and individual language and mixing them together. Actually, as an artist, this form of individual language is achieved precisely though the process of continually establishing traps. That is to say, setting traps is the prerequisite for ‘individual pre-recognition’, or doing things in advance of thinking about them. As Derrida once said, ‘you write before you think’.[10]

When Wang Guangyi was unveiling his major experiment, Great Critique, he commented that he regarded this as a ‘post-pop work solving the problem of the commodity economy’.[11] Most critics at first maintained that Wang’s work ‘borrowed from the commodity and commercial movements of the time, using Cultural Revolution images and logos to poke fun at business and commodities’. However for most Chinese, the theme of workers, peasants and soldiers in Great Critique conjured up feelings about the decade-long period of political upheaval and autocratic history. Even though Wang Guangyi and avant-garde critics almost never used the word ‘politics’, because of the extreme politicization prevailing in China from the end of 1990 to the beginning of 1992, his work inevitably was placed into the category of political satire. Soon, pop art flooded the scene at the Guangzhou Biennale, which consequently led to the category of Political Pop emerging in the 1993 China New Art Post-1989 exhibition, which presented works by Wang Guangyi, Yu Youhan, Li Shan, Geng Jianyu, Wu Shanzhuan, Ye Yongqing, Wang Ziwei, Feng Mengbo, Hong Hao, Liu Dapeng, Ren Jian, Wei Guanqing, Guan Wei, Wang Youshen, Qiu Zhijie and Ni Haifeng.

The critic Li Xianting published an article titled ‘Post-modernist Trends in China’s Art Circles Post-1989’ (89 nian hou Zhongguo yitan de hou-xiandaizhuyi qingxiang) in the inaugural issue of Genesis (Chuangshiji)in January 1993, in which he wrote:

After 1989, the ’85 New Wave artists abandoned the more serious, metaphysical posturing and lofty deconstructionist slogans that came to represent that movement and moved towards Political Pop satire. Using satire and humor, these artists created popular new works using Mao Zedong and other political subjects, which I call Political Pop. Crafted out of the same mold as the popular Mao craze of the early 90s, this new movement grappled with the complexities China faced in its struggle to discard the Mao complex of the past while being willing to adopt a more realistic approach in satirizing this ‘god’. There were two major differences between the present day and the Mao period: the generation that directly experienced the passion, fervor and eventual downfall of the ‘Red Sun’ Mao was significantly different from modern youth who tend to look at the period with indifference tinged with curiosity. Only by using a popularized and satirical approach to re-examine this period is it possible to dispel the solemn and sacred attitude that defined those former days. This is similar to the classic revolutionary song Red Sun (Hong taiyang) being sung in a contemporary setting by a contemporary pop star; the audience and singer cannot conjure up the same sacred and holy spirit that epitomized the past.[12]

Li Xianting’s first draft of this article was written in March 1992, but Wang Guangyi’s Great Critique was already complete in October 1990.[13] Prior to writing his article Li Xianting paid no attention academically to Wang’s Great Critique, because in keeping with the interests and ideology of that time, it did not fit any of the goals and aims called for by the popular catch cries of ‘great spirit’, ‘deliverance’ (chengjiu) and ‘ultimate concerns’ (zhongji guanhuai) then prevalent. Around 1992, however, this fashion among critical circles had disappeared. During this period, compromise and change were taking place at the center of political power. The issue in national political life was no longer the discussion about the necessity of social reforms but rather how to implement reforms or who should lead particular reforms. However, China’s 1.2 billion people, who experienced two thousand years of feudalism and a final decade of cultural destruction and political upheaval caused by the Cultural Revolution, began to feel a sense of a void existing because of the collapse of values and the disappearance of ‘truth’ from their lives. Therefore, the natural reaction to this void was to fill it with a grand narration characterized by the hollow call to arms and silly struggles.

For this reason, many important Chinese avant-garde artists of the ’85 period practiced restraint in their work, as we can see in Zhang Peili’s uninspired doodling of stereotypical images of female body-builders and broadcasters, Shu Qun’s Absolute Principle (Juedui yuanze), and the Northern Young Artist Group’s dry and lifeless work titled Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication and Division (Jia jian cheng chu). These and other works succeeded in making critics realize that a new art period had emerged, one that was a direct reaction to the violent political upheaval and unrest in recent Chinese history.

For critics interested in enhancing the political and ideological power of art, the pressing issue was how to highlight the newly formed art phenomenon and express their own political attitude. Against this background, Wang Guangyi’s Great Critique began to gain the attention of critics and artists alike. One after another, images and words about Great Critique began to appear in the media, with the Beijing Youth Daily of 22 March 1991 providing full, exclusive coverage of the piece. Although Great Critique had been created more for fun, with its origins attributed to commercial influences, it also became an important historical, political and ideological source for critics and it provided an indispensable new politically-charged artistic language. During Li Xianting and Zhang Songren’s preparation for the exhibition of China New Art Post-1989, more than one year after the unveiling of Great Critique, Wang adjusted his standpoint and attitude towards Political Pop and wrote an article analyzing the source and ‘inevitability’ of this new phenomenon:

The popularity of Political Pop is an obvious rebellion against the trends of the 1980s modern art movement. The social background of this movement was centered on two ideologies: the bombardment of Western philosophy and ideology after the beginning of the period of reform and opening, and the sense of loss accompanying the failure of the revolutionary realism of the Mao era. Therefore, the fundamental pillar of this movement became the rebuilding of a new Chinese culture via Western modernism. However, the movement’s summation and eventual conclusion came in the form of the China Avant-Garde exhibition of 1989. During this exhibition, in which an incident involving the use of a revolver in an art performance led to the show being expelled from the China Art Gallery, these new art movements soon become more of an underground phenomenon in opposition to government ideology. The idealists who at the end of the 1970s had attempted to use modern Western thought and trends to save and rebuild Chinese culture once again faced a spiritual void while serving as the breeding ground for the birth of anti-idealist art trends. This is precisely why so many activists of the ’85 modern art movement turned away from their earlier heroism, idealism, metaphysics and high-mindedness towards more popular and deconstructionist themes. These activists later become the preeminent authors of Political Pop.[14]

As mentioned earlier, the Post-89 China New Art exhibition pushed China’s contemporary art into the international arena. Without a doubt, the cultural, ideological and commercial elements of Chinese Political Pop emphasized the political nature of the post-cold war period in Western art. Thus, regardless of the wishes of artists and critics, making use of political and ideological elements to strengthen and enlarge the influence of exhibitions and works became a strategic consideration. Political conflict and ideological challenge in art perpetuated strategic confrontations in politics, culture and the economy between the East and West, which created a mutually meaningful tension. When the resources of ideological conflict between East and West were nearly exhausted, culture provided a new topic for Western society to examine. Like mushrooms sprouting up after rain, the political and ideological characteristics of art became a starting point for artists and critics alike in promoting China’s avant-garde art movement, which led to Political Pop. [15]

Wang Guangyi’s grid pattern portrait of Mao Zedong, created from 1987 to 1988, saw the beginnings of satirical and deconstructionist tendencies. In Great Critique, Wang Guangyi further distanced himself from the cultural criticisms of the eighties modern art movement, choosing instead to use popular Western logos like Coca-Cola and Marlboro on Cultural Revolution canvases, as if to remind his audience of China’s new commercialized image. Even though this juxtaposition in Wang Guangyi’s work was considered by Li Xianting to be ‘a criticism of the popularity of Western commercial culture in China’, Wang Guangyi was in fact playing with the word ‘critique’ (pipan) on purpose. By adding a satirical bent to the otherwise serious historical connotation of criticism, Wang Guangyi reduced its connotation to a level that minimizes its seriousness and magnified its humorous effect in a way that required no explanation. As early as March 1991, Wang Guangyi revealed his anti-art (fan yishu) intentions:

My artistic activities have touched upon topics of faith, aspirations and idolatry, which have led people to regard me as an idealist with an elevated spirit. Later when I made different works, people accused me of being a faithless nihilist. Actually, the only responsibility of an individual artist is to the rules validating art in the social structure, just as the only responsibility of athletes is to the rules on the athletic field; other questions are merely sociological margin notes. An artist should directly confront real concrete matters. Otherwise his or her competitive abilities will be compromised. In this regard critics also have responsibilities, because to take the universality of abstract human perfection and confuse that with specific scientific rules is very harmful, because this leads to a decline in human intelligence.[16]

In Wang Guangyi’s opinion, an art critic’s interpretations of an artist’s works are unnecessary and superfluous. However, ironically, when Political Pop appeared as a new artistic posture, social problems gave this art its qualifications and ideological value.

The difference between the linguistic system of Political Pop artists and Western pop artists is relatively small. Strictly speaking, the works of Chinese artists, when compared with their Western pop art counterparts like Andy Warhol, Richard Hamilton and Roy Lichtenstein, bring with them more messages and implications. In fact, the political meaning of Political Pop art works was intensified in part by the ideological conflict surrounding the composition of the works. In the article ‘Political Pop as a Mouthpiece’ (Zhengzhi-bopu daiyan xinsheng) published by the China Times (Zhongguo shibao, 18 March 1993), one journalist presents his own idea of pop art as it relates to ideology:

After 1989, artists all over the country made use of the corpse of Western pop art to criticize or ridicule the soul of politics; when an artist confronts a journalist he will describe how his works mock both politics and consumerism.[17]

Obviously, as far as Chinese avant-garde artists and critics are concerned, this type of linguistic ‘interpolation’ directly advantaged China’s avant-garde artists and critics; the addition of ‘politics’ to pop works provided an ideological focus that highlighted the past. The term Political Pop might well be Politicized Pop Art.

Historically speaking, the fact that politics became an important part of art is nothing new. The point is not whether or not art and politics are related, or to what extent politics influences art, but rather, what is the real meaning of politics? Is politics the opposition between two opposing language systems? Or, put another way, what is the relationship between the two rival language systems and the power systems supporting them? When we analyze the origins of Political Pop and its emergence in the contemporary Chinese art scene, we discover that the politics of today and its relationship with art are more complicated than we might first imagine. The relationship between the language system and its supporting power system is no longer the simplistic relationship between ‘underground’ and ‘official’ or ‘governmental’. According to Jeffrey Hantover:

There is a sense of waking from a delusion in Wang Guangyi’s paintings. The audience sees this disillusionment and participates in his creation. He knows that we know what he knows. We have a pretty good idea of where things stand, and that the well-known ‘heroism’ is really ‘anti-heroism’. However, to make fun of his works’ combination of ideological Marxist products with entrepreneurial capitalist products, and write him off as nothing but another Andy Warhol copy-cat would be unfair. It is unfair because Wang Guangyi, unlike many of his counterparts, is unyielding in his view on politics and where his art stands. He actually pays attention to politics and what it means. But if he believes the selling of capitalist products and Marxist ideology cannot save the world, he would be leading people astray. Wang Guangyi, when criticizing these two products and their ironies, is by no means saying that the cost and sacrifice of human life to gain these two products are equal. They are not equal, and it is this fact that leads many in his audience to misunderstand their meaning.[18]

Critics began to notice the common characteristics of Political Pop art at the New Chinese Art Post-1989 exhibition and its juxtaposition of political images with the contemporary logos of a consumer society. They recognized the negation, and the satirical and pejorative nuances that these Political Pop images and logos bring to the surface.

With his Great Critique series paving the way, Wang Guangyi’s influence on the Political Pop movement in the first half of the 1990s was enormous. Great Critique began to push the 1980s art trends grounded in the metaphysical ‘grand soul’ and the rational spirit into history. From 1990 to 1994 Wang Guangyi’s Great Critique series was greatly inspired by Wang’s reaction to contemporary commercial society. To quote his own words, the phenomenon of Western products flowing into China ‘was also a kind of violation’. However, we need to be clear that there was no deliberate choice of standpoints in these works. The artist was simply combining historical images and contemporary commercial goods to let the two engage in a ‘mutual critique’. The artist’s goal was to highlight the absurdity and theater of this juxtaposition, and to mock the special historical period in which these artists lived.

Among the avant-garde artists in China, Wang Guangyi is one of the few who clearly understands the political nature and strategy of art. He also clearly understands that works like Great Critique are merely semantic symbols representing the problems of that period of time and that these signs symbolize the characteristics of that period. That period aroused many feelings and discussions among Chinese people and therefore works like Great Critique become an inevitable representation of Chinese contemporary art. This point alone makes Wang Guangyi’s Great Critique one of the most important historical documents of China’s avant-garde art in the 1990s.

VII

Starting from 1993, when Great Critique: Coca Cola was published on the cover of the Italian art magazine Flash Art, until today, Wang Guangyi’s Great Critique has become a universally recognized image. At different exhibitions and at different times, he determines the meaning he wants to convey through different arrangements of the works. He has not only translated the images of Great Critique into sculpture and other art-related materials, but has also placed historical and politically related images into his work, such as classic Soviet-era images of war, politics and power. In fact, regardless of what period in which he bases his pieces, Wang Guangyi’s work always reflects his understanding of the nation, politics and power, believing that those symbols, images and language reflect the time period which he has personally experienced. Of course, he cannot abandon other historical periods, sometimes even making use of any image from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s and infusing them into his work, perhaps alerting us to the fact that what we regard as contemporary art concepts actually have contextual relationships with classic historical political images. As long as one has a basic knowledge of history, one can understand that taking those images and refining them as art is only a suggestive and indirect way of saying that art is always connected to history and related questions. On the surface, Wang Guangyi renounced art’s aggressive striving towards and onslaught on realism at a particular time and chose instead to look at the history of art, international problems in the post-cold war period, individual identity in the age of globalization and complex questions of inheritance, while intentionally abandoning abstract personal emotions and questions of life and death. Many years ago, Wang Guangyi studied Marcuse who maintained that ‘the more an artist concentrates on his own work process and logic, the more his art becomes a weapon that interferes with reality’. In the context of art and revolution Marcuse also argued that art cannot take the place of revolution and can only reflect revolution by changing political content into non-political matters of art. That is to say, only by letting political content become a backdrop for intrinsic aesthetic forms of art can art then fully reflect revolution.[19] This kind of thinking was very popular in China in the 1990s. Wang Guangyi, together with other Political Pop realist artists such as Fang Lijun and Liu Wei, was integral in abandoning the modernist trends of the 1980s and transforming them into more complex artistic phenomena such as Gaudy Art and other types of new art using various materials and methods. Wang Guangyi likewise was integral in establishing a new concept of painting. It is easy to see his influence on today’s younger generation of artists, through his appropriation of historical signs, his abandonment of superficial painting features and his concern with unavoidable reality and political questions and challenges.

Many years ago Wang Guangyi made the following statement:

From my own point of view, I am not interested in contemporary art. When I have free time, I don’t particularly enjoy flipping through contemporary painting albums, I just get annoyed. I prefer looking at classical ones instead. When looking at the works of Poussin, Ingres and Corot, I get excited. In the past, looking at Levitan’s works also got me excited. Even before I became an artist, I felt the joy of life. When I was young, I remember drawing a picture of an apple and being really happy at how close I got to its real look. I remember getting joy from drawing riverside scenery. But after I became an artist, I lost that happiness and joy. Perhaps this is the nature of art, but it seems as art develops, I am relegated to doing things I don’t enjoy, things that are far removed from that joy. I am very impatient, which is indeed a strange phenomenon. But ironically, the more I find myself in this state, the more I can create something. Once I have finished a piece, it loses its meaning for me, even though it’s related to the culture.

Wang Guangyi’s more recent work uses traditional picture story books (lianhuanhua) and this too reveals some of the artist’s inner complexities. Once more he utilizes images familiar to people born in the 1950s and 1960s, presenting images from the movement that sent educated urban youth down to the countryside, illustrations of troops doing firearm training, scenes from model operas of the Cultural Revolution plays and industrial worker scenes. Although these images are represented more in the form of serial comic book pictures, they draw from the same repertoire of historical symbols used in Great Critique. The fact of the matter is that these images are an indelible part of people’s memories and are indeed the product of politics and history. To this end, those accurate images remind us of the workers, peasants, soldiers and intellectual youth of that period and they are also part of the warm-hearted fellow feeling of the artist. To a certain extent, these images are their own experience, and they are themselves. After thirty years of reform, when Chinese artists contemplate the past, it is almost as though they undergo a re-awakening regarding the meaning of human happiness and passion. When this happens, there are unavoidable divergences in historical understanding. History, after all, cannot be simply covered up. But looking at the big picture, history is a continuous chain made up of different time periods and different events, a chain which constantly runs forever from its beginning to its end. Civilization is only a layer in this unending hypothesis, even though it is filled with fluctuating illusions. To use Wang Guangyi’s phrase, we can regard this unending hypothesis as a ‘critical history’.

Written 24 April 2007

Notes:

[1]Fine Arts in China(Zhongguo meishu bao), vol.1, no.18, 1985.

[2]Jiangsu Art Monthly (Jiangsu huakan), no.4, 1986, p.33.

[3]Fine Arts in China, vol.1, no.39, 1987.

[4]Idem.

[5]From 1985 to 1986, and from the end of 1986 to 1987.

[6]Wang Guangyi, ‘On Cleaning Away Humanistic Enthusiasm’ (Guanyu ‘qingli wenren reqing’), Jiangsu Art Monthly, October 1990, pp.17-18.

[7]Both the magazines Artist and Art•Market are registered as books for publication purposes. In China, applying for a magazine registration number (local ISSN) is very difficult. If a publishing house so desires, it can publish magazines using book numbers (local ISBN) but under a magazine title and format. Today’s Avant-garde (Jinri xianfeng)published by Sanlian Bookstore is also published using book numbers for each issue, rather than periodical numbers.

[8]Art•Market,no.1, 1991 p. 3.

[9]Ibid., p.4.

[10]Personal correspondence to Lü Peng written on 17 February 1991.

[11]Personal correspondence to Lü Peng written on 1 November 1990.

[12]Genesis (Chuangshiji), no.1, 1993, p.45. This magazine was founded in Xi’an in 1993, but it folded shortly afterwards.

[13]In a letter to Lü Peng of 1 November 1990, Wang Guangyi wrote as follows: ‘I am now preparing some post-pop works aimed at resolving problems in the commercial economy. If you come to Wuhan, you will have a chance to see them. If not, I will send you the video of them before the end of the year. I think you will be happy with my new works’.

[14]Reference to an informally published article of Li Xianting, ‘Political Pop in Post-1989 Mainland China’ (’89 hou Zhongguo dalu yishutan de ‘zhengzhi bopufeng’) in the unpublished Collection of Documents from the Seminar of the Second Exhibition of Contemporary Art Research, Guangzhou 1992. (Zhongguo dangdai yishu yanjiu wenxian ziliaozhan di’er huizhan, 1992 Guangzhou, Yantaohui huiqian wenxian zhuanji). This article was quoted in various versions by several publications between the end of 1992 and 1993.

[15]Li Xianting in his ‘Out of National Ideology’ (Cong guojia yishixingtai chuzou), wrote the following: ‘In the early 1990s I concentrated on recommending two artistic genres, Political Pop and Cynical Realism, and planned to exhibit these two trends in the Chinese New Art Post-1989 exhibition in Hong Kong and in the Mao Goes Pop exhibition in Sydney. In addition, some other important exhibitions held abroad also intended showing some of the artists I had recommended, including the 1993 Chinese Avant-Garde exhibition in Berlin, and later exhibitions at the Oxford Museum, as well as the 45th Venice Biennale and the 22nd São Paulo Biennale. These exhibitions demonstrated that this type of Chinese contemporary artist was popular and welcome in international artistic circles. This was very good news for Chinese art which had been essentially isolated from the international art scene for more than 40 years. This gave Chinese contemporary artists an opportunity to set up a dialogue with international artists. There is no doubt that the communications between China and the international art world have had a significant influence on the development of Chinese art. At the same time, we should also realize that those Chinese new artists who are popular in the West are often presented in publicity materials that focus on their political content, and they are used to serve a Western ideology that is in opposition to Chinese ideology. Thus these popular artists are snared in a complex international situation that reflects the Cold War and the end of the Cold War period. Both sides are caught in the trap. Westerners developed stereotypes equating Chinese art with ideology, and were over-sensitive to political symbols such as Mao, the Cultural Revolution and military themes in Chinese art works, and tended to magnify the symbols’ meanings and politicize nonpolitical elements. Political elements are, of course, one of the characteristics of Chinese contemporary art, but what is more important is the method of using political elements in works. Political elements are not simply instruments to fight an opposing ideology, but rather to show the culture of specific regions and political resources. They are also a way of highlighting ordinary human beings against the backdrop of a specific political environment, to show the ‘human-ness’ of the Chinese. As a person, an artist’s work is essentially the expression of his or her feelings about life, an experience that surpasses ideology. The humor, political mockery and self-deprecation in their work are their unique way of dispelling politics and the political and ideological pressure they lived under for so long. From this perspective, their political works are really anti-political works. Therefore, I hope my Western counterparts look at Political Pop from this ideological viewpoint, and strive to have a more balanced dialogue regarding Chinese art.

Historically, ideological confrontation ensured that Political Pop and Cynical Realism were accepted by Western society. Without such a background, Chinese contemporary art could never have been successful internationally. Therefore, the idea of a genuine ‘balanced dialogue’ was no more than a Utopia.’

[16]‘Marching toward True Life’ (Zouxiang zhenshi de shenghuo), Beijing Youth Daily, 22 March 1991, p.6.

[17]In an article titled ‘A Reflection of Changing Times’ published in the English language magazine Window’s 5 February 1993 issue, the author introduced Wang Guangyi’s self-statement as follows:

In an interview with Window during his brief stay in Hong Kong last week, Wang talked about his paintings and the ideas behind them. ‘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 Critique, 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 on an 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’.

[18]The following passages are quoted from He Qingji and Zhang Songren, in ‘New China Art Post-1989’, (pp.7 and 2, respectively):

Many artists in this exhibition play glibly with political images and themes, most conspicuously that of Mao Zedong whose renewed popularity in China dates from the late 1980s and reached a height in 1991-92. Elsewhere I have commented on this phenomenon in terms of ‘camp transition’, one in which a former style of politics ‘which has lost its power to dominate cultural meanings, becomes available, in the present, for definition according to contemporary codes of taste’. A number of artists here have taken to playful misrepresentations and rehearsals of the Chairman. They include Wang Guangyi, Liu Dahong, Yu Youhan, Wang Ziwei and Liu Wei. ‘It is not surprising, however, that much of the cultural iconoclasm that plays with Chinese political symbols tempers its irony with a disturbing measure of validation: by turning orthodoxy on its head the heterodox engage in an act of self-affirmation while staking a claim in a future regime that can incorporate them. On this most sublime level Mao has become a consumer item’. Mao and other dated icons of the militaristic phase of Chinese socialism can now safely be reinvented for popular and elite consumption. Madonna titillates her audiences with naughty evocations of Catholic symbols, ones that are culturally powerful and commercially exploitable. Political parody in China works in a similar fashion. (p. l), pp.48-49（Jeffrey Hantover）

Disillusionment permeates Wang Guangyi’s canvases and again we participate in a collusive act; he knows that we know what he knows. We know that to paint in the heroic mode now is an anti-heroic act. We laugh at his ironic juxtaposing of commodities, Marxist and capitalist, sold by ideological and entrepreneurial purveyors with equal cynicism. We do him an injustice if we think him only a jester à la Warhol: his stance is more engaged, his intent more political. However, he may be seriously misguided if he is equating these false roads to earthly salvation. Fair to attack them both, misguided to make them equivalent in human costs and consequences (p.lxiv).

[19]Aesthetic Three-Dimensionality (Shenmei sanwei), Sanlian Bookstore, 1989 edition, p.176.

Translated by Dr. Bruce Gordon Doar