We were together because of Lu Peng's 20th Century of Chinese Art. Thus, these wonderful texts and images were born.
Wang Guangyi
Note: there is last work made with Zhang Peili (see Zhang Peili)
Work in brush and ink on xuan paper (70x140)
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 of22 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. [13J
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.
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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 antiart (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.
Artists in Art History. Lü Peng.
Artists in Art History. Lü Peng.