Wang Guangyi

The centrality of Wang Guangyi as figure, and of his Great Criticism series as image, to the development of contemporary art in China over the last two decades simply cannot be overestimated. Born into abject poverty in the barren, frigid Northeast, Wang was thrice rejected from the Zhejiang Academy upon its reopening after the Cultural Revolution in 1977. Entering the oil painting department in 1980, he arrived just in time to catch the initial stirrings of the New Art Movement, as one hundred years of Western art history made their way into a circle that had been effectively cut off from outside influence throughout the communist period.

Newly graduated from the Academy, Wang took his assignment as an oil painting instructor at the Harbin Institute of Building and Architecture. With ten other artists and literati living in this remote locale, he founded the Northern Art Group, a visionary if idiosyncratic collective which proclaimed the expanses of Manchuria to be the logical site for a new Renaissance. Wang produced his Frozen Northern Wastelands series, a group of bulbous, grayish figure paintings evoking the light and hue of the far Northeast. This led directly into his Post-Classical series, which boiled major scenes and motifs from Western painting down into the same idiom of undistinguished, ghostly figures.

Wang won acclaim for these initial forays into conceptual painting as the New Art Movement swept the art establishment of the nation. He was transferred to Zhuhai, a Special Economic Zone bordering the Portuguese colony of Macau, to teach at the newly established Zhuhai Painting Institute. It was there, in preparation for the landmark China/Avant-Garde exhibition in 1989, that he produced his first political paintings, particularly the Mao Zedong AO series, which rendered the face of the Chairman behind a stark black grid, at once analyzing the once-ubiquitous image and placing a screen between it and the viewer.

Wang began the Great Criticism series, in which stock figures from the lexicon socialist propaganda are juxtaposed with foreign commercial logos, only after the upheavals of 1989. In turn, Great Criticism: Coca-Cola in particular quickly became a logo for China as then perceived by the West: a formerly socialist society struggling to come to terms with its new place in the global economy. The images proliferated in the foreign media, finding their way onto the covers of Flash Art as well as Time. Wang’s style, quickly termed “Political Pop,” aroused the ire of the Chinese art establishment even as it won him the interest of Western curators and collectors. Wang exhibited a group of Great Criticism works at the 45^th Venice Biennale in 1993, and has not shifted directions since.

Sotheby’s is pleased to offer two outstanding recent examples of Wang’s Great Criticism. After a long string of works playing with global brand names, Wang has recently turned his attention to the art world itself. Great Criticism: Andy Warhol (Lot 58) speaks to the oft-repeated comparisons between Wang’s Political Pop and the father of Pop Art more generally. Great Criticism: Pop Art, a monumental three-meter by three-meter composition in two panels, takes the comparison one step further, equating the very notion of Pop with the trademarks that once populated his canvases. Wang’s Great Criticism, which has functioned for more than a decade as a visual metonym for both Chinese art and New China itself, continues today to encapsulate the shock, joy, and unease felt in the West at China’s emergence into global prominence.